


Only Human

by Alara J Rogers (AlaraJRogers)



Series: Only Human Story Tree [1]
Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Only Human Story Tree, Q as human
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 1994-10-24
Updated: 2009-01-30
Packaged: 2017-10-03 11:33:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 364,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlaraJRogers/pseuds/Alara%20J%20Rogers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three years ago, Q lost his powers (as shown in the episode Deja Q), only in this story, he never got them back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Starbase 56

**Author's Note:**

> This work is very, very long, which makes it nearly impossible to warn for using just a drop-down box. There's absolutely no sex or romance in the first two chapters, some elements of UST in the third chapter, and the fourth chapter contains both consensual m/f and noncon of the "have sex or die" variety crossed with "aliens make them do it"... but each chapter is novel length by itself, so it's not as if any of these tropes predominate in the work. I've reset the tag to "Choose not to use archive warnings" because the archive warnings seem so absolute; I'd rather warn here.
> 
> List of warnings (this may be updated in future):  
> Major character death in the first 1000 words or so, suicide attempt, depression, people being completely dismissive of depression, violence (in flashback/discussion of past events, and then later, on screen), possible eating disorder, discussion of past female-on-male dubcon incident that the main character thinks was a rape attempt but no one took him seriously at the time, mental violation written as if it were rape, kidnapping, sexual harassment against a woman, rape threats made by men against a woman, torture, drug-induced fuck-or-die situation, female-on-male noncon, graphically described killings in a combat situation, memory erasure

Commodore Anderson was fond of saying that Starbase 56 was where masochists who enjoyed headaches got themselves stationed. It was true for any of the base's crew, and doubly so for Anderson herself. There were times when she honestly enjoyed her command here, and the challenges that Starbase 56's unique occupant brought with him. Times when she did not kick herself and wonder why she hadn't accepted the promotion to an admiralship on Earth. Times when she felt as if being in command of Starbase 56 was the next best thing to captaining a starship, or perhaps even better.

Now was not one of those times.

She felt the headache coming on, worse than usual, as Lieutenant Veloz's voice came over her comm badge. "Commodore. We have a situation."

No need to ask who the author of the "situation" was. "What's he done this time?" Anderson sighed.

"He's refusing to see the Klingon delegation, sir. Says that they're far too primitive and underevolved to understand anything he might try to teach them."

A particularly sore nerve throbbed behind her left eye. "He said this in front of the Klingons, of course."

"Of course, sir," Veloz agreed.

"Have the Klingons been restrained?"

"The Klingons have shown remarkable forbearance. They merely offered to rip out his spine and strangle him with it."

"What did _he_ say?"

"He just laughed, sir."

"Tell him _I'll_ rip out his spine and strangle him with it." Anderson amused herself a moment by vividly imagining herself doing just that.

"That wouldn't be very good for your blood pressure, sir," Veloz answered dryly.

She took a deep breath. "Right. Belay that last order, Lieutenant. I'll be right down."

* * *

Six years ago, the Galaxy-class starship _Enterprise_, under the command of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, had made first contact with an immortal, omnipotent and extremely arrogant entity called Q, who had put the starship's crew on trial for humanity's crimes. Picard and his crew had managed to persuade Q to rescind his death sentence, but in the process had unfortunately piqued Q's interest. The obnoxious entity had returned several times to torment the _Enterprise_ crew, usually claiming to be acting in the name of his race, the Q Continuum.

It had been difficult for Starfleet analysts to understand why such a vastly powerful and advanced race would send-- or even have-- such a petulant, immature emissary. As it turned out, Starfleet analysts had been right to question. Three years ago, the Q entity had turned up on the _Enterprise_ for the last time, claiming that his race had stripped him of his powers and transformed him into a mortal to punish him for misusing his abilities. He had indeed proven to be indistinguishable from human by any scan known to Federation technology, and in possession of no more power than any human had. It had been decided that he would be relocated to a starbase, where he would give Federation scientists the benefits of his millions of years of accumulated knowledge in exchange for protection from various enemies he'd made in his years as an omnipotent bully.

That was when Anderson's headaches began.

When she'd first been offered the assignment, she'd jumped at the chance. Q represented vast untapped potential for knowledge and exploration. If she had to be confined to a starbase-- and since her spinal injury, it was either a starbase or an Earthbound desk-- she was eager to have it be a starbase that would be a magnet for the Federation's best and brightest. The thought of fighting off numerous aliens bent on revenge hadn't frightened her; she had commanded a starship on the border patrol for the Romulan Neutral Zone, once, and had a great deal of tactical experience. But a chance to talk with an entity who _knew_ all the secrets of the universe, and had promised to reveal them in exchange for protection, had excited her almost as much as the prospect of commanding a starship had, once.

Then she'd actually _met_ Q. He had, in ten minutes, insulted her intelligence, implied that her people were incompetent, started calling her by her first name, and made outrageous demands for his living quarters, as well as complaining about the decor, the ambient temperature of the starbase, and the clothing patterns programmed into his personal uniform replicator. Her headache had never entirely gone away since. And that was before she had to start dealing with the scientists who came to see Q and thought she had some control over his obnoxious behavior. Or with the men and women under her command, who were loyal to a fault, but pushed to the limits of human tolerance by Q's remarkable ability to find and exploit weak points. Anderson lived with the nightmare that she would discover Q dead in his quarters one day, murdered by someone he'd pushed too far, and that she would have to prosecute the poor bastard instead of handing him the medal he'd deserve.

The Klingon delegation accosted her on her way to Q's quarters. "Commodore! A word with you!" one said.

She tried to remember who this one was. Dr. Morakh, that was it. The head of the Klingon Physics Institute, and the unofficial leader of this delegation of scientists. "Dr. Morakh. I'm sorry about--"

"We have waited for six months for an opportunity to speak to this creature about physics. Not to be insulted by him."

"It isn't you, Doctor. He does this to everyone."

"He has agreed to see any allies of the Federation in exchange for his protection. If he refuses to carry out his end of the bargain, I would recommend that the Klingon High Command pressure the Federation into withdrawing that protection, and I would encourage other races to do likewise."

"He _will_ talk to you, Dr. Morakh. I promise. I haven't used up my bag of tricks."

"I sincerely hope so."

"Give us five minutes alone with him," one of the other Klingons suggested, in a tone that promised death. "He will talk to us then."

"I'm afraid I couldn't allow that, as tempting as it sounds. He's too valuable to harm--"

"Oh, we wouldn't _harm_ him," the scientist said, smiling ferally. "It would be dishonorable to harm such a weak, unarmed opponent."

"But you wouldn't have to tell him that, would you?" Anderson murmured. "Very tempting, doctor, but no. Frightening the living daylights out of him might get him to talk, but he won't say anything useful if he's that scared. He'll just whine a lot. No, if you'd all just hang on for an hour or so, I promise you he'll see you."

"We will wait one hour. No more," Morakh said.

Anderson nodded, and headed down the corridor past them.

Q was waiting in the foyer of his suite, with Lieutenant Veloz. Obviously he'd expected her, or he'd still be in the suite proper. With a bright smile, he said, "Commodore Anderson! Come to slum in the gulag with us poor wage slaves?"

When Anderson was feeling sympathetic, she could see how miserable Q was by the ravages time had played on him. Three years seemed to have aged him ten. He was thin and drawn, losing his hair (which he mockingly claimed was because he wanted to be just like his idol Picard), and generally looked like hell. Right now, however, she was feeling anything but sympathetic, and the only thing she noticed about his appearance was his smug smile. "What right did you have to refuse those Klingons, Q?" she demanded.

Q leaned back in his chair, looking bored. "I already explained my reasons. They simply aren't advanced enough to benefit from my knowledge."

"Q--"

"There's an old Earth saying that applies to this situation perfectly. It goes something like this: 'Don't try to teach physics to a gorilla. It only wastes your time and annoys the gorilla.'"

"These particular 'gorillas' have wasted a great deal of time getting to see you. They're going to be a lot more annoyed if you _don't_ teach them."

"It's hardly my fault how evolutionarily unprepared they are." He sat up straight and looked at Anderson with an expression that would have been sincere on anyone else. "Don't get me wrong. Klingons are great if you need beings to beat their mighty thews and charge in where angels fear to tread. All of their evolution has been aimed at making the perfect warriors: strong, tough, violent and unimaginative. Marvelous killing machines, but they're not much on the higher brain functions. I mean, they make you humans look positively advanced, and that's really saying quite a bit."

"Q, your bigotry is not the issue here. The issue--"

"Oh, I wouldn't call it 'bigotry', Eleanor." Anderson did not quite clench her teeth. Q used her first name quite deliberately when he wanted to annoy her. "'Bigotry' implies an irrational, unreasoning prejudice. I did quite a bit of research on the Klingons back when I was omniscient, and I'd say I remember a significant portion of it. I speak of facts, not blind bias."

"Regardless of what you want to call it, those Klingons want to talk to you. It's completely irrelevant whether you think they're capable of understanding you or not. These are Klingon scientists--"

"Now there's an oxymoron if I ever heard one," Q muttered.

"--in good standing, the brightest of their race--"

"Which is rather like saying 'the best-looking Ferengi'."

Anderson ignored him. "--and they want to talk to you. By your agreement with Starfleet, you are bound to talk to anyone Starfleet invites to talk to you."

"And if I don't? What will you do? Throw me to the wolves?"

"Quite frankly, Q, nothing would give me greater joy right now than to toss you out the nearest airlock."

He was completely unfazed by the comment. Either he was positive she wouldn't do it-- which was true enough-- or he simply didn't much care anymore. "Perhaps it would. But you can hardly afford to indulge such fantasies, now can you? I may be the most valuable commodity your precious Federation currently has. You would have lost to the Borg two years ago if not for the information I gave your tacticians and scientists. You wouldn't dare rescind my protection without a _much_ better reason than a few disgruntled Klingons."

Anderson sighed. "I suppose you're right. If you refuse to talk to a few scientists, there really isn't much we can do about it."

"I'm glad you see it my way," Q said, surprised. He was obviously waiting for the other shoe to drop, so Anderson obligingly dropped it. She turned to Lieutenant Veloz.

"Confine Q to his quarters, without computer access, until he agrees to see the Klingons."

Q shook his head. "Oh, no. Not this again. I'm not falling for it this time."

"'Falling for this'? This isn't a bluff, Q." Anderson stood. "Lieutenant--"

Veloz nodded and took Q's arm, pulling him to his feet. Q yanked his arm free. "You can't do this."

"I just did."

"You know perfectly well what confinement without computer access would do to me. My life is tedious enough as it is. You'd make it utterly unbearable."

"I suggest you decide which you find more unbearable-- boredom or talking to Klingons."

"You don't know what you're setting in motion, Eleanor," he warned. "How many times are you going to pull the same trick? It's gotten very tiresome, you know."

"So has your obstructionist behavior. It's my job to make sure the people under my command do their jobs-- and that means you. Now make up your mind. Will you talk to the Klingons, or spend a few weeks staring at the ceiling?"

Q stared at her for several seconds, his expression unreadable. Finally he sighed with excessive boredom. "If it's so important to you, I'll talk to your precious Klingons," he said. "Though I can't guarantee they'll get anything out of it."

"I thought you'd see reason," Anderson said approvingly. She turned to Veloz. "Monitor the conversation. If you think he's being deliberately dense, get Commander Sekal to sit in, and if Sekal thinks he's being deliberately dense, lock him away."

"Yes, sir," Veloz said, with enthusiasm. No doubt the opportunity to lock Q up was one the crew looked forward to eagerly.

* * *

Commander Sekal, the head of Starbase 56's Science Division, was one of the few people who could tell the difference between Q genuinely having a hard time expressing a concept in terms his audience could understand, and Q being deliberately obscure. In addition, as a Vulcan he was less vulnerable to Q's unpleasantness than most, and thus could deal with Q even at the entity's worst without losing his temper as most of the humans on the base would. Anderson found him rather cold and aloof personally, as she found most Vulcans, but she felt she owed her sanity to him.

"So how did it go?" she asked.

"It was less unpleasant than I'd have conjectured," Sekal replied, his hands folded neatly in his lap. "Initially he was offensive and obstructionist. When Lieutenant Veloz and I reminded him that he was in danger of losing computer privileges, he claimed that he no longer cared, and that he didn't 'have to put up with any of this'. Lieutenant Veloz proposed that we might leave him with the Klingons for a few minutes, to which he replied that he couldn't care less. At this point, I suggested that if he were truly so apathetic, perhaps he should enter sickbay for a few weeks of observation. That seemed to be effective-- he made a few outraged protests, but calmed down quickly and behaved reasonably afterward."

"Reasonably?" Anderson asked.

"As reasonably as one can expect, from Q. Commodore, I think there may be reason for concern."

"About what?"

"Frankly, Q seemed to give in too easily. He calmed down too quickly-- as if he no longer cared enough to press the issue, which would be unusual for him. I am hardly an expert on human emotions, or Q's emotions for that matter, but I was left with the distinct impression that he is more depressed than usual."

Anderson sighed. "He's always depressed. And he's always taking it out on the rest of us."

"I have reason to believe it has been steadily getting worse."

"I'll have Counselor Medellin talk to him."

"That might be a wise idea."

As Sekal left, Anderson checked on Medellin. The counselor was off-shift right now, relaxing in the rocketball court. It would be a shame to drag her away from her free time to have her talk to Q-- besides, Q was always depressed. It could wait until tomorrow.

She took a deep breath. In an hour or so, she would get to go off-shift herself, at least if no emergencies came up. The day's paperwork was done, the Klingons had left reasonably satisfied, and there were no visitors scheduled for another week or so. Her head didn't even hurt overmuch. Finally, she had time to read her mail and the Starfleet newsbriefs.

Halfway through the newsbriefs, she paused over one item. A query to the main newsbase delivered no more information about the notice than the newsbrief had contained. She stared at the brief for several seconds, trying to decide whether Q's right to hear this outweighed her desire to not deal with him right now. Eventually, she sighed and stood up.

* * *

Q was in his suite, sprawled on cushions on the floor and listening to music as he read. He put down the viewer as Anderson entered. "What is it now?" he asked, annoyed. "I was nice to your Klingons."

"This isn't about that. I just got some information I thought you might want to know."

"Really." Q sat up. "Enlighten me."

"I'm afraid that Captain Picard is dead."

Q blinked. "You have an interesting definition of 'want to know', Commodore," he said. "I needed to hear this? I needed to be any more depressed than I already am?"

"Forgive me if I've intruded on your vast self-pity," Anderson said sarcastically, "but I thought you had the right to know." She started to turn toward the door.

"How did it happen?" Q demanded.

Anderson turned back. "It didn't say. Just that he died in the line of duty."

"It was probably something stupid," Q muttered. "Something unworthy of him. He should have taken me up on my offer when I wanted to join his crew, when I still had my powers. I could have protected him..."

"I don't think he wanted your protection."

"Foolish of him. Now he's dead." Q looked away. "Funny. Ever since the incident with the Calamarain, I've thought Jean-Luc would probably outlive me. Silly of me, I suppose... he's been out there in the middle of nowhere, with no protection, while I have an entire starbase dedicated to protecting me... I can't imagine him dead, you know that? It's not as if I haven't seen mortals die before. I've outlived thousands of beings I knew, before. But it comes as a surprise, this time, somehow..."

"I'm sorry," Anderson said. Just when she thought it was safe to despise Q, he showed some signs of having feelings other than his constant self-pity.

He looked at her. "Commodore, I don't often make personal requests..."

He made them all the time, actually-- but no, she knew what he meant. He almost never made requests of any emotional significance. "Go on."

"I'd rather not see any visitors for the next few days, if it's possible."

"I understand." Since he had no visitors scheduled, it wouldn't be difficult to grant him that much. "I think it can be arranged."

After she left, Q walked into the bedroom proper, over to his chest of drawers. He pulled open the top drawer and lifted out a bottle of etching solution. For a minute or so he studied it.

"When I make a decision, you'll be the first to know," he told it, and put it back in the drawer.

* * *

The restaurant/lounge was subdued at this hour of the morning; there were enough people that no individual conversation stood out, while not enough for it to be crowded. As Counselor Nian Medellin came in, she had no trouble picking out Q-- he sat by himself at a table by a port, staring out at the stars. She was almost surprised he'd shown up. Medellin had purposely asked to meet him in the lounge because he was too intimidating in home territory, like his quarters. He knew precisely how to use his body language to maximize visitors' discomfort-- or if he didn't know how, he had an amazing unconscious talent for it-- and Medellin was a small woman, while he was a rather tall man. He already had enough of an advantage. She hoped that sitting in a public place, across a table, would protect her enough from his talents at obnoxiousness that she'd be able to help him.

Medellin sat down at the table, across from him. "Would you like to talk about it?"

He didn't look at her, continuing to gaze at the stars. "Talk about what?"

"What's bothering you. Sekal thought you might be more depressed than usual--"

"Sekal, of course, is an expert on human emotion."

"Commodore Anderson agreed with him. Is it the news about Captain Picard?"

"Is what?"

She calmed herself silently. He was hurting, and she was base counselor. It didn't matter how unpleasant he was, she had to help him if she could. "I'm very sorry. I know he defended you when you first came here."

"What makes you think this is about Picard?"

"It's natural to be depressed when you've suffered a loss--"

He turned around. "Oh, you're so unbelievably dense. Do you seriously think I would prostrate myself with grief over Picard? This has nothing to do with him. I can't say I was happy to hear the news that he'd died, but to assume that that's what's bothering me is not only illogical, but arrogant in the extreme. Who are you to tell me why I'm depressed?"

"So you admit that you _are_ depressed."

"Of course I'm depressed! I've been depressed since before I got here! You're a poor excuse for a counselor if you haven't noticed by _now_, Nian."

"I mean that it's gotten worse lately. It has, hasn't it?"

Q turned up his wrists and looked down at them. There were no scars-- Dr. Li had done his work well. "I've been wondering what the point to mortal existence is," he said, and looked up at her. "Since you're all going to die in the end anyway, why fight so hard to make it later rather than sooner? In the grand scheme of things, mortal lives are meaningless."

"So you believe?"

"So I _know_. I don't have the luxury of holding grand illusions about the importance of my fate to the universe. I know exactly how much my life is worth this way. Struggle on for another 80 or 90 years and then what? Death anyway. Why not speed things up? What's the _point?_"

"The point is the happiness we can enjoy while we're still alive."

"Dear me. I thought the point was supposed to be the difference we could make to the universe. Are you advocating wanton hedonism now?"

"Most of us feel more fulfilled when we're doing something that makes a difference. We have friends that care about us, and people whose company we enjoy, and things we want to do in our lives."

He smiled mirthlessly. "You've just argued my point for me, Counselor. _I_ have no reason to go on living."

Medellin cursed inwardly. Q talked about suicide a lot, and had made two somewhat half-hearted attempts, seemingly more to get attention than to seriously do himself in. This might simply be another ploy. But he sounded sincere this time. "That can't be true. Not entirely."

"Believe what you like, Nian, but I know how I feel. There is no one who cares about me, except as a valuable commodity to the Federation; no one whose company I enjoy anymore; and nothing I particularly want to do. And I think you left out the most important reason you humans go on living-- your fear of the unknown. You don't know what death is, and it frightens you-- your typical primitive response to that which you don't know and can't understand."

"I don't think that's primitive. We have every reason to fear something as unknown as death."

"But I do know what death is." He looked down again. "And I'm quite certain that avoiding it is not worth all this."

She tried the tactic that had worked last time. "I thought the Continuum told you that if you stuck it out, they might give you your powers back."

Q laughed bitterly. "I believed that for three years. They simply knew how to push my buttons, that's all. I don't seriously believe they ever meant that, now. They won't forgive me."

"You don't know that. What if they were planning on giving it back to you soon, and you kill yourself? You'd be cutting yourself off from immortality."

"And what if they're waiting for me to get tired of their silly game and opt out of it before they give it back? Don't try to second-guess them, Nian. You're only human. Even _I_ wouldn't presume to guess what they're doing anymore, and I used to know them as well as I knew myself."

"You enjoy some things, don't you? You've collected all those antiques from Earth--"

He smirked. "Those were primarily valuable in that it amused me to watch you all scrambling to get them for me. Do you seriously think material toys can keep me happy? You really are a terrible counselor, aren't you?"

"I don't often have patients as determined to be unhappy as you are."

"I'm not determined to be unhappy. It just worked out that way. I'm simply not cut out for living as a human."

"You deny yourself the potential of human life. In all the time you've been here, you've never set foot on a planet, never used the holodeck or any other recreational equipment, had no sexual contact with anyone--"

He grimaced. "Oh, _please_. I just ate."

"Why do you consider sex so disgusting? It's only a human biological function, like eating and sleeping. There's nothing inherently disgusting about it-- or there shouldn't be, to one who didn't grow up under a repressive moral system."

"I think you fail to understand. Eating and sleeping _are_ disgusting. I perform them because I have no choice. I can't keep myself awake indefinitely and if I stopped eating, you'd just force-feed me. But I won't go out of my way to experience a vile human biological function if I don't have to, and sex is not a requirement for human existence."

"Some would say it's a requirement for happy human existence."

"Most of Earth's Orthodox Catholic priests would disagree. Besides, leaving aside the repulsiveness of the act and how silly it looks, who would have me? Don't think I don't know about the opinion people on this station hold of me. Or are you suggesting that you or someone responsible for my welfare would provide me a partner, for the sake of my mental health?" He shook his head. "Even if I wanted it, I wouldn't want it on those terms."

"What about the holodeck?"

"For sex? You _are_ disgusting."

"I meant in general. You never use it, or any of the other recreational facilities."

"What would I use it for? To play for a brief moment at being a god comes a very poor second to actually being one. And the holodeck can't free me from the limitations of this shell. It can only give me what my human senses can perceive. Why can't you understand that the biological facts of my existence are appalling to me? You think I should be glad to be alive, whatever the price. Suppose you were blind, deaf, crippled and confined to a bed. All your sensory knowledge of the world must come in through touch, and you must depend on others to touch you, others who don't even like you. Would you be glad to be alive?"

Medellin shook her head. "You're being self-pitying again, Q. Your situation is not nearly that bad."

"Compared to what I had before? It's worse."

"You can't dwell on the past! It doesn't matter what you had before. What matters is what you are now." She leaned forward. "I agree with you that your lack of friends is a problem, but don't you realize you've done that to yourself? We were ready to welcome you with open arms when you first came, and you antagonized _everyone_. I think what you need is a vacation."

"Excuse me?" He stared at her as if she had suddenly sprouted an extra head.

"I mean it. Not for very long; we couldn't take the risk that your enemies would track you down away from the safety of the base. But an opportunity to meet new people, and possibly _not_ antagonize them immediately this time; to get out of your routine, maybe find something that you do enjoy doing. From the amounts you've read since you came here, I assume you like to learn new things."

"Nothing I learn is _new_," he said, scowling. "I used to know everything. I've just forgotten most of it."

"Well, then you enjoy relearning things. Don't you?"

"I suppose so. Inasmuch as I enjoy anything."

"Well, I think that's it. Travel, new experiences, new people-- you're too good at antagonizing people for me to believe it's anything but deliberate. If you really _wanted_ to make friends, I think you could. Maybe you could go to Earth. I know you have an interest in Earth history."

"Hardly an interest. I was engaged in the study of humans and their history when I was condemned. Since the knowledge was uppermost in my mind, I remembered most of it."

"Whatever it is. Would you like to go to Earth?"

He sighed. "You won't stop hounding me, will you? Certainly. Schedule a vacation for me. Send me to Earth. I'm sure it's exactly what I need and will solve all my silly problems."

"You don't need to be sarcastic. Just think of it this way. What have you got to lose?"

"Nothing," he said soberly. "Nothing at all."

"All right." Medellin stood up. "I'll talk to the Commodore about it; it might take a few days to schedule. Just hang on, okay? Things aren't as bad as you think they are." She smiled winningly at him. Q stared at her, then shrugged and half-smiled back. Medellin nodded and left the lounge.

Q watched her go, his smile widening and becoming bitter, mocking. Let her entertain herself trying to stave off the inevitable. It was already too late.

He stood up, pushing aside his chair, and walked out of the lounge.

* * *

In his quarters, he took the bottle of etching solution out of the drawer again and held it up to the light, popping off the cap. The solution inside was colorless, resembling water. But the strong acidic smell that wafted up from inside spoke of something far harsher to flesh than water would be.

__

I've held out for so long. Three years is nothing to you, I know. But it's been longer than eternity, to me. And you haven't given me any reason to keep hanging on. So I'm afraid I'm going to end your little experiment. If there are any objections, let's hear them now.

No voices spoke in his head. No flash of light heralded a visitor. He hadn't really expected anything like that, but even still, a tiny shred of hope died in the silence around him.

__

All right then. Let's get this over with.

* * *

When they'd first made the decision, he had been shocked, horrified, disbelieving. Not in the sense that he believed they were lying, or that it wasn't going to happen; he was still part of them at that time. He knew they meant it. But he couldn't understand how they could do such a thing to him. Condemnation to mortality was nothing but a sentence to a slow and agonizing death. What had he done to deserve this? Had he been human already, he would have pleaded with them, begged, demanded to know why. At the time, though, he was still Q, and knew better. He accepted the decision numbly, unquestioning, knowing there was nothing he could do to alter his fate.

They asked him to choose what species of mortal he would be, and where in the physical universe he wanted to be. He had only a fraction of a second to decide, but for a Q that was long enough to consider several options. Briefly he toyed with becoming a non-sentient animal. Without sentience, he wouldn't be able to hold to his memories long; he would become that animal, and forget he had ever been anything better. But he didn't _want_ to forget, and besides, without that animal's instinctive knowledge he'd be dead very shortly. He needed a sentient race that would accept him, that would teach him how to be one of them. It had to be one he had a great deal of personal experience with, because no mortal brain could retain the memories of omniscience; he wouldn't remember what he'd known through the totality of the Q Continuum, only what he had personal knowledge of, and little enough of that. Unfortunately most of the sentient races that he knew personally knew him personally-- he wouldn't survive long among them. Humans were one of his current pet projects, and he believed he could talk Picard into protecting and guiding him, despite the unpleasantnesses he'd inflicted on the man. So he'd asked to be human, and to be sent to the bridge of the _Enterprise_.

By vast coincidence, or perhaps someone's idea of an evil practical joke, he had shown up during the middle of a crisis that the mortals aboard _Enterprise_ had no explanation for. A moon was falling out of orbit, to crash on an inhabited world, and Picard was convinced Q was the cause. It took hours, and a great deal of humiliation, to convince the _Enterprise_ crew that he was as powerless as he claimed, and had nothing to do with the moon's fall.

Around that time, one of the races he'd expected to come after him had shown up. The Calamarain were an energy-based lifeform, very sophisticated as lower creatures went. They had the power to determine what had happened to him and to track him down (or had someone helped them with that? Q had enemies within the Continuum as well). Twice they assaulted him, despite the _Enterprise_'s attempt to protect him. Q had not truly thought out the implications of mortality before. Certainly he'd known that he could now die, but he hadn't really understood it until the Calamarain's ionized tachyon plasma field first started draining his life.

By that time, he had been thrown in a brig, experienced the terror of falling asleep and the pain of hunger, not to mention being tormented by an old enemy aboard the _Enterprise_ itself. He had been humiliated numerous times, forced to perform menial tasks, and realized how much more unpleasant mortals' dislike of him was when he was on their level. The second time the Calamarain attacked, the android Data had saved Q at risk to his own life, and Q had started to feel ashamed. After all, his own people, who knew him completely, had thought him worthy only of mortality and death. He was not happy, nor making anyone else happy, nor serving any purpose with his continued existence at all. He was terrified of everything, and miserable, and lonely, and he couldn't imagine bearing this state of affairs for any length of time.

To make matters worse, the Calamarain were inevitably going to destroy the _Enterprise_ to get to him. The _Enterprise_ would be able to hold up against them if it abandoned Bre'el IV to its fate and fought, and it would be safe from the Calamarain if Picard tossed Q out the airlock, but Picard would do neither. Picard was incapable of making such ruthless choices, Q thought. He would try desperately to save both Q and the planet, and doom both and his ship as well. And Q could no longer allow that to happen.

So he'd stolen a shuttlecraft and gone out to meet the Calamarain, taking the decision out of Picard's hands. He had been utterly terrified, of course. He was miserably unhappy as a human, but even still he didn't really want to face death, and more importantly, he didn't want to face pain. The execution method the Calamarain would use would give neither a quick death nor a painless one. But he couldn't see the sense in seeing people who wanted to live, people who had gone out of their way to protect him, die so he could prolong an existence he hated.

As the shuttle headed outward, a transmission came in from the _Enterprise_\-- Picard. "Shuttle occupant, identify yourself."

He turned on the comlink. "Don't try to talk me out of it, Jean-Luc."

"Return to the ship immediately!"

Q almost wanted to laugh. Did Picard think he would do it just because Picard told him to? "I just can't get used to following orders."

Behind Picard, on the viewscreen, he saw Worf, saying, "The plasma cloud is moving toward the shuttlecraft."

Well, of course it was. Didn't they understand what he was doing here? "It's _easier_ this way," he told them. "They won't bother you after I'm gone."

Next to Picard, Riker said, "Engineering, prepare to extend shields," and Q felt a spike of genuine anger, as well as a bit of surprising gratitude. Riker was more ruthless, more adaptable than Picard, and had somewhat more reason to dislike Q-- and he couldn't make the necessary choice either? Couldn't any of them see that this was the only way? "Please, don't fall back on your tired cliché of charging to the rescue just in the nick of time," he snapped. If their compassion drove them to such stupidity, perhaps he could bring them to their senses by making them think this _was_ the compassionate thing to do. "I don't _want_ to be rescued. My life as a human being has been a dismal failure. Perhaps my death will have a little dignity."

"Q, there is no dignity in this suicide!" Picard shouted.

Q experienced a sensation he didn't understand-- a tightening of the throat, a pain in his chest. Picard didn't understand. After all this, Picard still didn't understand. "Yes, I suppose you're right," he said, bitter self-pity welling up. "Death of a coward then, so be it. But as a human-- I would have died of boredom."

He cut the transmission and ignored the _Enterprise_'s attempts to re-establish contact. Despite his experience at observing mortal death, he had never thought about it from this end before-- he wondered if the experience would seem very different, now that it was actually happening to _him._

Then he felt a faint, inexplicable dizziness, and saw the walls of the shuttle bay around him instead of stars. He had been transported back into the _Enterprise_.

The controls were frozen. Nothing responded. Furiously, Q stormed out of the shuttlecraft, out of the bay, and ran directly into Picard, Worf, Troi and Riker. Before they could say anything, he laid into them. "How _dare_ you interfere like this?" he demanded. "I told you I didn't want to be rescued. There was only one way my human existence could have had a point, and you just deprived me of that! What gives you the right to dictate my life?"

"You mean, what gives us the right to transport you somewhere against your will, demand that you obey us or punish you with unpleasant consequences, and interfere with your right to do as you wish?" Picard asked.

"Exactly," Q snapped, and then realized the trap he'd just fallen into.

Picard merely looked at him. Q glared at the four of them-- everyone except for Picard seemed to be wearing a smug smirk. "This is unfair and hypocritical, Picard. You're the one that kept telling me that the power to do something is no excuse for doing it."

"And so it isn't. Protestations that we are being unfair are a bit hollow, however, coming from you."

"After all, Q, fairness is such a human concept," Riker said. "Think imaginatively."

Q ignored Riker's dig. "You don't understand! You're so marvelously compassionate, Picard. So full of respect for all life, even mine. Weren't you going to say something like that? Well, if you don't make some hard choices and sacrifice _someone_, you're going to destroy everyone. You can't protect your precious Bre'el IV, your ship, and me at the same time. And it makes far more sense to sacrifice me than a ship or a planet. Even you must be able to see that."

"Much as I dislike agreeing with him, sir, he has a point," Worf said. "We cannot fight off attacks by the Calamarain and save Bre'el IV."

"You see? I knew if I argued that I ought to die, Worf, at least, would be on my side."

"Perhaps you're right," Picard said. "Perhaps it will become necessary to sacrifice you. If so, I'll keep in mind that you've volunteered." He looked as if he couldn't quite believe it. "But we have not yet exhausted all the possibilities. Until then, I cannot simply allow you to destroy yourself--"

"Then you're a fool!"

At that point Picard's badge bleeped. "Bridge to Picard."

"Picard here."

"Sir, the Calamarain has vanished. In a bright flash of light."

All eyes turned on Q. "So you have no powers," Picard said softly. "You can't stop the fall of the moon. You are forced to nobly sacrifice yourself for the good of the ship." His voice harshened. "I almost believed you."

"What do you mean, 'almost'? It's true!"

"What did you do with the Calamarain, Q?" Riker demanded.

"I didn't do anything! You think I did that?"

"In our experience, things rarely disappear in a bright flash of light unless you are somehow involved," Picard said.

"I didn't _do_ it! Look, if this _was_ a charade-- and I don't know why you insist on believing it is; I assure you if I had my powers I would _never_ humiliate myself so consistently and so long for the sake of a mere game-- but if it was, why would I wreck everything by displaying my powers so openly? If I _had_ had my powers, and I wanted the Calamarain to leave, I'd have banished it more subtly than _that_."

"You aren't known for your subtlety, Q," Riker said.

"I'm not known for keeping up an act this long, either," Q snapped. "You believe I'd go to all this trouble and then make the Calamarain vanish in front of you? Credit me with at least as much intelligence as you yourself have!"

"Captain," Troi began, "I believe he's telling--"

"Now, folks, let's try not to be closed-minded here," a voice behind him said, interrupting Troi.

Q whipped around. The being that stood 3 meters away, next to the bulkhead, was wearing an unfamiliar form, a blond man dressed in the same disgusting gray and green jumpsuit Q himself had been forced to wear. But Q recognized him immediately. "Q!" he cried, hopefully. Did this mean the Continuum had reconsidered? "What are you doing here?"

Picard glanced at them both. "This is-- one of your race, Q?"

"Guilty as charged," the other Q said to Picard, and turned back to Q. "I've been keeping track of you."

"I always thought you were in my corner."

The other Q shook his head, laughing. "No, no. Actually, I was the one that got you kicked out."

As Q's eyes widened in shock, Picard said, "Am I to take it that you are responsible for the disappearance of the Calamarain?"

"Of course I was. You really should have guessed it was one of us, Captain-- Q may be dumb, but like he pointed out, he's not _that_ dumb."

"And are you also responsible for the fall of the Bre'el satellite?" Picard's voice was ice cold.

"Don't be silly. What do you take me for? Him?" The other Q's voice sharpened as he turned to Q. "You know you're incorrigible, Q, you're a lost cause, I can't go to a _single_ solar system--" He gestured with his hands, appeared to notice he was doing so, and trailed off slightly, distracted by the study of his hands. "--without having to... apologize... for you..." He dropped his hands and glared at Q. "And I'm tired of it!"

"_I_ wasn't the one who managed to misplace the entire Deltivid asteroid belt."

"Hey! This isn't about me. I've got better places to be. But someone had to keep an eye on you, to make sure you didn't cause trouble... even as a member of this, mmm... limited... species."

"Well, if _that's_ how you feel, why did you send the Calamarain away?"

The other Q ignored him and turned to the _Enterprise_ crew. "I've got to admit you guys are pretty impressive, as lower species go. I can see what he sees in you. After all the stuff he did to you, you still went out of your way to keep him safe-- even to the point of risking yourselves. That's amazing. There's a lot of more advanced species that wouldn't think of it. You guys are on the right track."

Troi said, "Q implied that he-- and by extension, all of you-- believed compassion a weakness."

"You have to ignore 90% of everything Q says. We always did."

"Then he was never sent by the Continuum to test us?" Picard asked.

"You haven't answered my question!" Q interrupted. "If you have such a low opinion of me, why did you save me?"

"Well. You were about to get yourself killed to save these humans. Seemed to _me_ like a bit of a selfless act."

"You flatter me. I was merely trying to put a quick end to a miserable existence."

"Yeah, I know. Don't try to mislead _me_, Q, you couldn't do it before and you sure as hell can't do it now." He vanished and reappeared next to Q, leaning to speak directly in his ear. "You and I both know," he said softly, "that the Calamarain would have destroyed the _Enterprise_ to get to you. And that's really why you did it. Wasn't it?"

Q's mouth quirked into a smile. He began to hope again. "It was a teeny bit selfless, wasn't it."

"There, you see!" The other Q stepped back and threw his hands in the air. "I couldn't go back to the Continuum and tell them you committed a selfless act just before the end! If I did, there'd be questions, there'd be explanations, for _centuries!_"

Riker said slowly, "You saved his life just so you wouldn't have to explain to your superiors how he died?"

"Hey, if you think human bureaucracy is bad, you should have to sit through a meeting of the Continuum. You were lucky to escape, believe me. Besides, it wouldn't be _how_ he died, it'd be the fact that I _let_ him die after he demonstrated a chance at redemption." He turned back to Q. "I thought about giving you back your powers."

Q's heart lurched. He wouldn't have phrased it that way if there was any hope. "And?" he asked, trying to sound casual.

"And no go. The others aren't convinced you've done enough to deserve it."

Q swallowed, staring straight ahead. "I see."

"No, you don't. See, you're a screw-up, Q. You go out to study some new race and you can't resist the temptation to interfere with them, to lower yourself to their level. We've warned you and warned you and you still keep doing it. And you don't even do it _right_. Any of us could have told you that making a human a Q wouldn't have taught us diddly-squat about humans." He jerked a thumb at Riker. "By the time he was really Q, he wouldn't have anything in common with humanity anymore-- and the species might be extinct by then."

"I don't understand," Riker said. "Was it a genuine offer or was he only playing with me?"

"Well, both," the other Q said. "You'd have been Q, all right-- the youngest of our infants. It would have been at least a few thousand years, more like a few hundred thousand, before you'd have become a full Q, on a par with him and the rest of us. And it'd be several million years before you'd be considered mature. This guy here hasn't even gotten that far."

"It seemed like a good idea at the time," Q said. "If you all objected so strongly, why didn't anyone stop me then?"

"We did, after you'd screwed it up. But that's beside the point. Look. Now you've got me and some of the others interested in humanity. And we've figured a much better way to understand them. Rather than make a human a Q, we'll take the opportunity you gave us, and make a Q a human. After all, you we know. We can monitor you and observe how you change as you become more human, and that'll tell us loads more about the human condition than incepting a human would have. So studying humanity's still your assignment. You've just got a different perspective now."

Q stared at his former comrade. "Q, I don't _believe_ your unmitigated arrogance! The complete _gall_ of you people! You throw me out, condemn me to this-- this fragile, feeble existence-- and you still expect me to _work_ for you? To _help_ you?"

"Of course," the other Q said simply. "No matter how human you become, you'll always be Q. You'll help us whether you want to or not. Besides, play your cards right and _maybe_ we'll change our minds about reinstating you. It's up to you."

"Then-- it's not certain. You still might take me back."

"That's what I just said, isn't it?"

"Are you going to leave him here?" Picard asked.

"I'll tell you what. You didn't ask for this, after all. We'll protect him against anything too major for you humans to handle-- for instance, if the Ayathieri came gunning in person, you'd be up a creek. Anything like that, we'll take care of. It's up to you guys whether or not you protect him from lesser threats, the kind you _can_ handle, like our friend the Calamarain. Or for that matter whether you dump him out the airlock. We're not going to lift a finger to protect him from lesser threats-- if you guys want to mistreat him, that's your business. We won't interfere. Or let him come back to get revenge, if he does get reinstated. After all, it wouldn't be a good test of the human condition if he had guardian angels hovering around, would it?"

"I suppose not," Picard said. "How can we be certain we can trust you, though?"

"See what I have to deal with because of you?" the other Q demanded of Q. "No one who's met you trusts me."

"I'm awfully sorry. Would you like me to flagellate myself into the bargain?" Q asked with bitter sarcasm.

"Hey, if you want to. I'm sure a whole bunch of us would enjoy watching." The other Q turned back to Picard. "We aren't all like this specimen, believe me. Otherwise we wouldn't have thrown him out."

"It would help if we knew a bit more about the Continuum and its motives in all this. As you've implied, we can hardly trust Q's word."

"Well, you can trust it better now." He glanced over at Q. "You hear me? No more lies about the Continuum. It's making us look bad."

He was about to leave. Q swallowed his pride. "Wait. Before you go?"

"Yeah?"

"I wouldn't ordinarily ask, but since you're in the neighborhood anyway-- and I know it wouldn't be any effort for you-- and they've lost a lot of time to this little conversation--"

"You want me to fix the moon for them."

"If you would."

The other Q scowled. "You _know_ we're not supposed to do stuff like that. If we do, then they get dependent on it, and they don't solve their own problems--"

"They've have solved it long ago if we hadn't interfered. You know that."

"You mean if _you_ hadn't interfered."

"Well, you let me! That makes it your problem. You didn't have to send me to the _Enterprise_ in the middle of a crisis, you know. You could have arranged for me to arrive a few days later. But no."

The other Q sighed. "Okay, fine. But don't ask me for anything else. This is positively the last time, you understand?"

"Completely."

"And you asking this isn't winning you any brownie points, you know."

"Do you have to be so incredibly suspicious? Read my _mind_, Q. Am I asking for brownie points? Is that what your omniscience tells you?"

"That's what me knowing you tells me." The other Q studied Q a moment. "You really _are_ serious. Maybe there's hope for you yet."

"Yeah, well, don't tell the others or my reputation will be shot."

The other Q grinned. "All right then. Try and stay out of trouble?"

He vanished in a characteristic burst of light as Picard's badge bleeped again. "Bridge, sir. We have an incoming transmission from Bre'el IV science station."

"I'll take it in my ready room in two minutes." He looked at Q. "It appears-- for the moment-- that we're stuck with you."

"I wouldn't phrase it _that_\--"

Abruptly he felt a wave of dizziness. He swayed, and his vision dimmed. Troi caught his elbow. "Q! What's wrong?"

"I'm... not sure." He leaned against the wall, getting his equilibrium back. "I feel..."

"Dizzy?"

"Yes, exactly. Dizzy. And-- and _hollow_, somehow. Does that make any sense?"

"When did you last eat?"

"I didn't."

"Counselor, get Q something to eat," Picard said. "You're assigned to him until Data recovers. Number One, Mr. Worf, report to the bridge. I'll be headed for my ready room."

Everyone nodded and headed off their separate ways. Troi frowned slightly. "I thought Data took you to Ten-Forward and got you something to eat."

"He did. I was going to have chocolate sundaes. But the Calamarain attacked, and I lost my appetite. Are you sure I need to eat and I'm not coming down with a disease of some sort? Or falling asleep again? This doesn't feel the same way hunger did before."

"Well, your body _could_ be reacting to the Calamarain attacks. But I think it's more likely an adrenaline reaction, compounded by the fact that you haven't eaten. Your blood sugar's probably low, after all that excitement. If you still feel ill after you've eaten, I'll take you to sickbay."

She started forward. Q followed. "Are we going to Ten-Forward?"

"Yes."

"Can we go when Guinan's not there?"

Troi looked back at him and smiled. "That's right. I forgot you and Guinan have a history."

Q felt a surge of remembered outrage. "She's a dangerous creature! I can't understand why Picard allows her to roam free on his ship. When I went to Ten-Forward before, she _stabbed_ me!"

"You don't look hurt," Troi observed.

"She stabbed me with a fork, in the hand. I was actually _bleeding_. They fixed it at sickbay, after the Calamarain attacked."

"I see," Troi said, still smiling. "Well, Guinan will leave you alone if I ask her to."

"That's why I couldn't eat. I ordered ten chocolate sundaes and I couldn't eat any of them because she made me so angry I lost my appetite. Then the Calamarain attacked, and I just never had any time."

"Wait a minute. You ordered _ten_ chocolate sundaes?"

"Data said that _you_ said that eating chocolate was good for a depression. And I was utterly miserable."

Troi began to laugh. Q glared at her. "What are _you_ laughing at?"

"Q, you don't eat ten chocolate sundaes!" She controlled herself. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't laugh at you."

"You're certainly right you shouldn't. Why can't I eat ten chocolate sundaes?"

"It would make you sick! One, maybe two-- if that was your only meal I could even see three. But not ten, Q. You'd never have been able to finish them all." She shook her head, smiling wryly. "I suppose that's the down side to having Data take care of you. He doesn't know things like that either."

"Well, how many does it take to cure a depression?"

Troi shook her head. "In the first place, while chocolate makes me feel better when I'm sad, it won't necessarily help you. Different people react differently to food. You might not even _like_ chocolate-- though I think you will. Most humans do. But in the second place, it's not a magic cure-all. I can sense quite how badly you feel, Q. If _I_ were that unhappy, chocolate might make me feel a little bit better, but it wouldn't make my hurt go away. You can't expect a chocolate sundae to solve all your problems."

"I wasn't expecting it to _solve_ all my problems. I'd settle for temporarily forgetting about them, though."

They arrived at Ten-Forward. Guinan was visible behind the bar, and Q flinched slightly, stepping behind Troi a bit. "Are you sure we can't go at a later time?" he asked nervously.

"You need something to eat now. Don't worry. I promise Guinan will leave you alone." They walked over to the counter furthest from Guinan. Q saw a look pass between the two women, and felt a sudden sense of panic. Maybe they were conspiring against him. Troi was going to set him up to relax and think he was safe and then Guinan would ambush him. He wasn't really afraid of her using her special abilities on him, not really; she had been awfully reluctant to use them against him when _he_ was at full power, and she certainly wouldn't need them now. But he was well aware of how fragile his body was, now. She could hurt him in a million different ways.

"Q, calm down," Troi said. "No one is going to hurt you."

"Then what were you looking at Guinan for? I saw you. You were telling her something, weren't you."

"I'm not a telepath."

"You don't need to be! You were saying something with that look, I know you were."

"I was, as a matter of fact. I was signaling her to leave us alone." Troi shook her head. "You're feeling paranoid, Q. There's no need for it. I promise you, no one in Ten-Forward will hurt you."

"Are you sure? You can't control Guinan, you know. She'll do whatever she wants. She's not reasonable."

"I think you're describing yourself better than Guinan. Whatever history the two of you have, Guinan is my friend. She won't interfere with one of my patients if I ask her not to. Now please. Relax. No one will hurt you."

Despite himself, he found himself believing her. He took a deep breath and tried to relax. This constant fear was wearying and unpleasant-- he had to try to be less of a coward, or he'd die of exhaustion. "All right. I'll try to calm down."

"I know it's hard for you." Troi put a hand on his arm, obviously trying to comfort him. The gesture itself meant nothing to him, but oddly enough, he was slightly comforted by the fact that she'd thought to make the gesture. "You're not used to being vulnerable to anything, and you're not sure what can threaten you now, so you're jumping at shadows. But you do have to calm down, or you'll make yourself sick."

"What should I get to eat, then? Since you're the expert."

The waitress approached. Troi leaned forward. "We'll have baked minea fish, lightly braised in butter; a dish of mixed vegetables cooked in bouillon broth; mashed potatoes, lightly buttered and well-whipped; a glass of water; a glass of chocolate milk, no lactose; and two chocolate sundaes, to be brought with the rest of it. The temperature of the hot food should be mild."

The waitress nodded and left. "So you think two chocolate sundaes is all right, then?" Q asked.

"You're only getting one. The other one's for me."

"Why can't I have two chocolate sundaes? I need it more than you."

Troi sighed. "Q, have you ever heard of the Earth saying 'Your eyes are bigger than your stomach'?"

"It doesn't ring a bell. I don't know everything anymore, you know."

"I didn't expect you to. My father always used to say that to me. It's a human expression for when a child doesn't understand the limits of his own capacity for food, and asks for a lot more than he can eat. You have the same problem. You have no idea what your capacity is. And right now, I think it would be better for you to not get enough to eat, and feel a little hungry, than to eat too much and get sick."

"The prospect doesn't sound awfully appealing, I admit." Q propped up his head on his hand. "It seems like there are dozens of things that can make me sick."

"There are. You'll have to be careful in testing your limits, the first few days. That's why I ordered what I did for you."

"Why?"

"The food I ordered is very mild. Some would think it bland to the point of tastelessness. But I'd rather you ate something nutritious and boring than that you ate something that you hated violently, or that you were allergic to."

"Allergic? I might be allergic to food? No one told me this."

"We don't know. You'll have to go carefully the first few days, as I said."

Q shook his head in disbelief. "It's just one thing after another."

The food arrived. It smelled quite pleasant, which was a plus-- Q didn't think he could stomach food that smelled bad. The whole notion of putting dead organic matter in his mouth was slightly disgusting anyway. As he smelled the food, he abruptly felt the return of the sensation he'd first identified as hunger-- gnawing emptiness and odd noises in his abdominal region. He picked up one of the utensils awkwardly. It was a fork. "What should I start with?"

"Begin with the hot food," Troi advised. "It'll get cold faster than the ice cream will melt."

"How am I supposed to use this?"

Troi took the fork from his hand and demonstrated. "Spoons are much the same, but you scoop with them instead of spearing. The fork is for the hot food, and you use the spoon for the ice cream."

"Fine." He speared a piece of fish, somewhat awkwardly, and ate it. It was quite pleasant, actually. He had imitated the act of eating before, to experience taste, but he had never before felt this sense of intense satisfaction at consuming food. His body instinctively knew what it needed, and rewarded him for supplying it. "This isn't as bad as I thought."

"I'm glad to hear it," Troi said, digging into her ice cream sundae.

Q tried bites of all the items on his plate. He found the mashed potatoes soothing, the vegetables somewhat bland and mushy, and the ice cream sundae delicious. Quickly he ignored the rest of his food and began to devour the sundae, smiling. "You were right. This _is_ quite good."

"Don't eat so fast. You'll get a headache."

That seemed like a ludicrous notion to Q. There was no way that he could see that eating quickly could possibly result in a headache. This sounded like an old wives' tale, on the order of parents telling their children not to stick their hands out the windows of aircars or the hands would be ripped off. Q knew for a fact that no child had ever had his hand ripped off simply by sticking it out the aircar window, and he doubted anyone ever got a headache from eating too fast. He was probably violating some ridiculous cultural taboo, not that he cared. Ignoring Troi, he continued to wolf down the ice cream.

To his great surprise, an agonizing pain stabbed through his head. Q gasped and dropped his spoon. Troi looked concerned. "What's wrong?"

"My head," he said. He looked at Troi disbelievingly. "You were right. That's ridiculous. How can eating quickly give you a headache?"

"I don't know what the physics of it is," Troi said. "But when I give you a suggestion, perhaps next time you might consider following it, instead of deciding you know best."

Q tried to take another bite of the ice cream. The pain came back. "How do I finish this without hurting myself?" he asked miserably.

"Take a break. Eat the rest of your meal. It'll warm you up."

Q took a few half-hearted bites of his food. It was less tasty now. What he really wanted was the sundae. He studied it morosely. "Well, _this_ was a useless remedy. I'm still depressed."

Troi sighed. "I told you it's not a panacea. Besides, you enjoyed it, didn't you?"

"Well, yes. Until my head exploded."

"Then it showed you that there are some benefits to being mortal after all. So you couldn't call it a total loss, could you?"

Reluctantly Q nodded. "I suppose so."

Troi's badge bleeped. She touched it. "Troi here."

"This is Picard. Counselor, are you still with Q?"

"Yes."

"When he's done with his meal, I'd like to see him in my ready room."

Q started to stand up. Troi motioned him back down again. "Acknowledged, Captain." She turned to Q. "He said you could finish dinner first."

"I want to get it over with."

"Finish your food. The captain hardly wants you to starve."

The food was significantly cooler, and had even less taste now. If he hadn't still been so hungry, he wouldn't be able to force it down. "Let me ask you a question, Counselor."

"Go right ahead."

"Why are you being nice to me?" She blinked at him. He continued. "I could understand Data-- he doesn't dislike me, since he can't feel any emotion. You, however, I have to presume probably dislike me as much as anyone else aboard this ship. Why are you going out of your way to explain things to me, and comfort me, and all that sort of thing?"

She shrugged. "It's my job. If I couldn't put aside my personal feelings for someone to help them, I wouldn't be a very good counselor."

"One could wish Picard and Riker saw things that way."

"Captain Picard and Commander Riker aren't ship's counselors. It's _my_ job to ensure the morale of everyone aboard this ship, including you."

"Do you feel any qualms? Desire for revenge, outraged justice, the like?"

"No. You have to understand, Betazoid 'justice' is very different from human. We don't believe in punishing people in order to try to redress some cosmic balance; two hurts don't cancel each other out. On Betazed, we prevent criminals from committing crimes again, but we also do our best to make them see why what they did was wrong and how to correct themselves in the future. Since you've been stripped of your powers, you can't commit crimes against us again. So now our task is to rehabilitate you."

Q laughed. "That's ridiculous."

"How so?"

"Do you expect that anything you could do to me in a human lifetime could balance out millions of years?"

"Yes. I do." Troi leaned forward. "Q, we don't grow unless we're challenged. Faced with adversity. You haven't had any reason to change in all those millions of years, since you were never faced with adversity. Now, you have a much greater opportunity for learning experiences. You're likely to change more in the next five years than you did in centuries of omnipotence. And I think that's very valuable. I think this experience will be good for you."

"Hardly, if I die of it."

"I suppose that's true. But that gives you a risk-- something to work toward and something to lose if you fail. If your Continuum does take you back, you will probably be a very different person. That's what I'm looking at when I'm dealing with you-- not the spoiled, petulant godling who tormented us, but the potential to grow into a decent human being."

"I have a hard time appreciating your point of view." He pushed aside his plate, empty. "And I don't think I'll _ever_ be able to cut it as a human being."

"Perhaps you're underestimating yourself." She smiled. "For once."

"I doubt it."

"It's not _that_ hard to be mortal."

"Maybe not for you. I have several million years of habits to unlearn."

"If you stay aboard the _Enterprise_, I'll help you with it. You might be surprised at what you can adapt to."

"If I ever adapt to this, I will be _very_ surprised." Q stood up. "I'd better go see what Picard wants."

"I'll go with you." Troi got up.

"That isn't necessary. I know the way from here."

"I know you do, but he left me in charge of you. I think the captain would prefer you didn't go anywhere without an escort."

Q smiled thinly. "What, is he afraid I'll steal another shuttlecraft?"

"It's standard procedure for guests to the _Enterprise_ to have escorts."

"Whatever." He sighed as he walked out of Ten-Forward. "Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die."

* * *

Troi, thankfully, stayed outside Picard's ready room as Q entered, feeling slightly as if he were walking into the jaws of a large and hungry beast. "You asked to see me, _mon capitaine_?"

"Sit down," Picard said, motioning at a chair. Q did so, somewhat nervously. Picard studied him for several moments, generating an uncomfortable silence. Finally, when Q was about to say something, anything, to break the silence, Picard said, "It appears I may have misjudged you."

"Probably," Q said. "But I won't hold it against you, Jean-Luc."

Picard looked exasperated momentarily, but controlled it well. "Before today-- before an hour or so ago-- I would have said that you were entirely selfish, incapable of inconveniencing yourself for another's sake, let alone capable of self-sacrifice. I still find it somewhat hard to believe that you were willing to die for us. Perhaps there's a little more-- humanity-- in you than I would have thought."

"There's no need to be insulting."

"It was not intended to be insulting. As you well know."

Q looked away. "Yes. I know."

"Did you believe the others would intercede for you? That they would take you back if you committed a selfless act?"

"If I had, it would hardly have been selfless, would it?" Q turned on Picard. "You know, I resent your implications here. You don't know me. You know nothing about me. Except for the past twenty hours or so, all you've seen of me is what I chose to show you, and on that basis you make judgments about what I'm capable of? You don't know what I'm capable of. I do understand the concept of guilt, you know. And the concept of the good of the many outweighing the good of the few. Those things are hardly unknown to the Q."

"I have wondered if you possess a moral sense at all. When you first came here, you leveled accusations against us that almost precisely corresponded to what you yourself were doing. You claimed that we were a savage race who made prejudgments on the basis of little or no understanding, demonstrating that you yourself did exactly that. Now I am left with the impression that you were never sent with the authority of your Continuum at all. That they in fact disapproved of your behavior and have disapproved for some time."

"I can see where you'd get that impression."

"Everything you have told us about them is a lie, isn't it?"

"Hardly everything. It's true they kicked me out. You can see that for yourself."

"When you last came here, you told us that you had been exiled from the Q Continuum, but you were still in obvious possession of your powers. Was that a lie as well? And if not, what further thing did you do to justify being punished more?"

Q sighed, realizing that he wasn't able to dissemble on this topic anymore. "Not a lie... exactly. But it... wasn't exactly the first time they'd done it, either."

"You'd been exiled before?"

"It's a temporary sort of thing. No one takes it very seriously-- it's generally only for a few hundred years or so. It's happened... a few times. The last time, they were mostly annoyed with me because I..." He realized he was saying too much, and that he really didn't want to explain the next part.

"Because you what?"

He also didn't seem to have a choice. "Because I, uh... didn't exactly have the, uh, authority to give Riker the powers," Q mumbled.

"And was that part of the reason for your further punishment?"

"No, that... they've apparently been debating that behind my back for the past thousand years or so. It just happened they reached a decision now."

"I see." Picard steepled his hands in front of his face. "Now. Why, exactly, did they throw you out?"

"You heard him. And I told you already, anyway."

"I want to hear it again."

Q sighed. "They think I use my powers irresponsibly. I take privileges I have no right to. I consistently bend the spirit of the law in following the letter. I disobey my elders. I torment lower races and make the rest of the Continuum look bad. Do I have to go on?"

"No," Picard said, nodding. "I would say that I agree with their assessment."

"Well, I'm sure they're all thrilled to hear it."

"Do you believe the punishment was justified?"

The worst of the depression, held somewhat in abeyance most of this time, crashed in on Q. He folded his hands in his lap and stared down at them, silent for a minute. He hadn't needed to hear that question, hadn't needed to be reminded. In a small, almost inaudible voice he whispered, "...yes."

Picard looked surprised. "You do?"

Q looked up, taking refuge in anger. "The Q Continuum is perfect, incapable of making a mistake. Individual Q, yes, obviously. But if I were to believe for a moment that the Continuum, acting as a whole, could make an incorrect judgment, it would invalidate everything I've known for millions of years. Frankly, I'd far prefer to believe that I'm an evil bastard who deserved what he got. See, I don't think you understand, Picard. Your human analogies only work up to a point. I was _part_ of the same body that judged me! Part of me... was part of the decision to condemn me." He sagged again, the anger fading. "I told you I understand the concept of guilt."

"You... condemned yourself?" Picard sounded somewhat shocked.

"It's... complicated, and I doubt I could explain in human terms. But... I was part of the Q Continuum. That doesn't mean the same thing as being part of the human race. To a certain extent... we are all the same entity."

"Like the Borg?"

"_Not_ like the Borg, nothing like the Borg. We value our individuality very highly. But... I just can't explain it in human terms, all right? We're all individuals _and_ we're all part of a collective mind. You'll just have to accept that."

"Very well."

"But... to the extent to which I am-- _was_\-- part of the collective... it wasn't a decision made by vote, the way you would understand it, any more than the separate parts of your mind vote on your decisions. There were pros and cons weighed, but in the end, it was unanimous. It had to be, or they wouldn't have acted on it. And at the time that the Continuum unanimously decided to throw me out, I was still part of it. So-- in a certain limited sense, yes. I condemned myself."

Picard sighed. "I'm not sure I understand, but I'll leave it at that. I really hadn't intended for this to turn into an interrogation."

"What an astonishing coincidence that it turned out that way, then." Q frowned at Picard. "Tell me, Jean-Luc, _has_ there been a point to all these questions aside from your desire to needlessly humiliate me?"

"Yes. There has." Picard leaned back. "I doubt I will ever be able to forgive you for the deaths of my crewmen, the last time you were here. And I think it would take a great deal of time for me to be able to forget how you treated us, the first and second times we encountered you. But I have revised my opinion of you somewhat. I now believe that there is some hope for you-- that you might, perhaps, develop into a better person. Perhaps someday, unlikely as it seems now, even a person worth knowing."

"Really." This was surprising, and pleasant-- after the direction the conversation had taken, Q was expecting another long speech about how horrible he was. He controlled the impulse to smile. "Does this mean you'll let me stay on your starship?"

"I've been considering that very question."

"And?"

"No."

Q stared at Picard. _I'm going to take the word 'and' out of my vocabulary_, he vowed. "What do you mean, 'no'?"

"I mean no. I don't believe it would be beneficial for anyone for you to stay aboard the _Enterprise_."

"Why not?" The fear came back again-- fear that he would be cast out, abandoned to die or simply abandoned, left with people he had even less affinity with than the _Enterprise_ crew. "I could be helpful. I told you last time, you're not prepared for the dangers out there. I may not be omniscient anymore, but I still have a vast amount of knowledge I could share with you-- and with my powers gone, you don't need to mistrust me quite so much. Picard, you're turning down the opportunity of a lifetime."

"I am also turning down the headache of a lifetime. Q, I am not disputing that you could be very useful. But frankly, you're not worth the trouble. If it were simply that you are a danger to this ship, I might decide differently. We are reasonably well able to defend ourselves, and there is precedent-- Starfleet ships have offered people with dangerous enemies sanctuary in exchange for information or services before. In fact, I can say with some certainty that if some other entity, with whom we had had no experience, turned up in the same situation as you, requesting the same protection as you, and offering the same information as you, I might have accepted. The trouble is that I know you."

"You're abandoning me just because you don't like me? I thought better of you, Picard."

"In the first place, I'm hardly abandoning you. I will arrange a sanctuary for you-- elsewhere. In the second place, if it were simply that I personally disliked you, I would never let it interfere with my decision. And in the third place, whether you believe it or not, I have your best interests in mind as well as the welfare of my ship."

"Oh, _my_ best interests in mind? Let's hear your explanation for _that_, Picard. This one ought to be good."

Picard leaned forward and spoke calmly, evenly. "You are obnoxious. Insubordinate. Unused to discipline. You possess no workable interpersonal skills. These things alone would make a starship a bad place for you. The morale of my people depends on their ability to trust and get along with one another, and you are neither trustworthy nor socially adequate."

As Q opened his mouth to interrupt, Picard held up a hand, overriding him. "Before you complain that you _are_ trustworthy or some such, hear me out. If you cast in your lot with us, I have no doubt that you would _want_ to be trustworthy-- that you would not betray us for casual amusement, as you would have in the past. You are simply not dependable. As I've said before, you are insubordinate, undisciplined and very much accustomed to getting your own way. There are times aboard a starship when everyone's life depends on one person's ability to obey orders quickly and without question. Perhaps you could learn to take orders from me. But what about others? Today you interfered with our work on the Bre'el satellite because you refused to take commands from Mr. LaForge. Your abilities are of no use to us if you cannot use them under someone else's direction. You might be required to work under the direction of Data, or Worf-- for that matter, it is not inconceivable that in some situation you would be working under Wesley Crusher. Could you under _any_ circumstances take orders from a sixteen-year-old boy?"

Q looked down. "You... have a point," he admitted reluctantly.

"Even this would not be an insurmountable difficulty, if you were on another starship, or we had no history with you. Neither of these is the case, however. Before, I told you that you would have to work hard to earn our trust. I've reconsidered in the light of the past several hours, and I no longer think that working hard would do it. Q, you don't have the skills to win our trust. We knew you when, and that will always interfere. It would be an intolerable strain on ship morale if I were to ask my people to protect an individual who has harmed them in the past, who does nothing to make them like him, and whose presence puts the ship into grave danger."

"I thought you humans were supposed to be so compassionate."

"Compassionate, yes. But compassion doesn't operate in a vacuum. Humans learn the rules of social interaction with one another, rules to... _encourage_ others to be compassionate with them. The only social interaction you've mastered is how to be obnoxious. I don't think you even need to try. In fact, even when you try not to be, you're obnoxious. For instance, earlier, when you came into my ready room to talk to me after you were last attacked by the Calamarain, you sat down on my desk. You _must_ be aware of the fact that I find such behavior intensely irritating."

"I didn't-- I wasn't trying to be irritating. I didn't think--"

"You didn't think. Precisely. I know you weren't trying to be irritating, Q. In your own fashion, you were trying to apologize, I'm sure. But you see my point. At your most sincere, you still manage to annoy people." Picard sighed. "When Data first came aboard the _Enterprise_, he hadn't much more practical knowledge of human social interaction than you do. In many respects, he had much less. In some respects, he still has much less. But Data had no bad habits to unlearn. You are going to have to be with people who'll be very patient with you while you unlearn your bad habits and learn good ones-- and I don't think the _Enterprise_ crew is capable of being that patient with you. You need to go somewhere new, start over with people who didn't know you as an omnipotent bully. People who didn't lose 18 friends and shipmates to an encounter you provoked."

"I'm getting very tired of you throwing that up in my face, Picard," Q snapped. "I didn't kill those 18 people. The Borg did."

"We would never have encountered the Borg if you hadn't sent us into their territory!"

"_Au contraire, mon capitaine._ You're going to encounter the Borg in less than a year, and I won't have had a thing to do with it. If you'd let me join your crew, I would have warned you-- they're heading for Federation space, they've been headed this way for some time, and I'd estimate their arrival at sometime this year or next."

Picard stared. "That's not what you implied last time."

Q shrugged. "I've been known to be vague about the facts."

"And I'm expected to believe you this time?"

"This time I've got as much at stake as you do. Believe me, I have no desire to be assimilated by the Borg." Q leaned forward. "I could help you against them, Picard. We have some time to prepare. I don't know very much about your technology, it's true, but I understand physics far better than any of your people possibly could. I've also made a minor hobby of studying the Borg-- I know far better than you what _they_ can do. I could work with you on improving your technology, exploiting weaknesses in the Borg-- There's no way you can beat them without my help, you know that."

"I appreciate the offer, and I'm sure Starfleet will wish to take you up on it. The _Enterprise_ is not the place for that, however. You would need to be somewhere stationary, somewhere that Federation scientists can get access to easily."

Or in other words, no matter what Q said, Picard would find an excuse to abandon him. Q sighed, defeated. "What did you have in mind?"

"If you were to offer your knowledge to the Federation as a whole, I'm sure Starfleet would be happy to give you protection. They could set you up on a starbase or a station, something with a fairly advanced defensive capacity. Federation scientists would come to you for theoretical knowledge, or historical data, or anything you have the ability to tell them about. In exchange Starfleet could protect you, provide you room and board and whatever else you need."

"You've wanted to shuffle me off to a starbase since this began."

"Q, a starbase would be a far better place for you than here. For one thing, if you were providing the Federation with your knowledge, you would become very valuable. You would be given sufficient status to compensate for your--"

"Personal problems?"

"Personality problems, I would say. But yes. And as I said before, they wouldn't know you. They'd have no previously established reason to dislike you. You might even make friends." Picard sounded as if he didn't entirely believe the last part of what he was saying himself.

"What do you mean, they wouldn't know me? How am I supposed to explain my knowledge-- and my need for protection-- without telling them who I am?"

"Oh, they'll know who you are. I'm sure they'll be briefed thoroughly. But humans usually prefer to decide their own opinions on the basis of personal knowledge, rather than relying on someone else's experience. They will know _of_ you, but they won't _know_ you, and that might make all the difference."

There was apparently no way to get out of this. "If you insist, Picard." Q still felt as if he were being abandoned, but he wasn't about to admit it-- he had already shown far too much weakness for his tastes. "Make whatever arrangements you wish, I'll comply with them. I don't appear to have much of a choice."

"No. You don't." Picard stood up. "I'll have Counselor Troi take you to spare quarters in one of the civilian areas and set you up there. We probably won't be able to drop you off for a week or so, so you'll need a place to stay. You can wash, rest, get changed, that sort of thing."

"Anything's an improvement on the brig. I'm not picky."

Picard smiled. "I rather doubt that."

* * *

His quarters were boring, impersonal, identical to every other spare bedroom on the ship and close to identical to every occupied quarters. Troi brought him there, giving him a civilian combadge. "Ordinarily, civilian combadges are only used in emergencies, and for their locator function. You're a special case, however. You shouldn't use them to hold a conversation, but if you need something, touch the badge, give your name and the person or place you're trying to reach."

"I'm not stupid, Counselor. I've figured that much out from watching the rest of you."

Troi shrugged. "I don't know how much you know-- and since there's so much you don't know, perhaps it would be better to give you too much information rather than too little. You can use the computer to read, listen to music, look up information, and many other things. It's voice-activated, so just tell it what you want. The clothing replicator is over here--" she gestured. "Simply step inside and it'll take your measurements. After that, any clothes you want replicated, call up on the menu."

"What about Starfleet uniforms?"

"You're not Starfleet, so those aren't on your menu. Once you're on the starbase, you'll have access to clothing shops, and you can get anything you want-- except Starfleet uniforms." She smiled. "I'm sorry, but we worked to wear those outfits. As for here, I'm afraid you're limited to what's on the menu, but there's a wide variety. Clothing for women only is marked with an 'f'-- you'll look rather silly if you call one of those up."

"I figured that one out too. And if you worked so hard to wear a Starfleet uniform, why aren't you?"

"This is more comfortable-- and I think it makes me look a little bit more relaxed, more like someone to talk to than a member of a military structure. I think it's important for a counselor to seem personally open, and I think wearing a Starfleet uniform would detract from that a bit." She touched a pad, and another door opened. "In here is the bathroom. Let me show you how to use the fixtures."

As she explained the plumbing and the reasons for it, Q felt a surge of nausea. He'd forgotten entirely about this aspect of human existence. "How unbelievably vile," he muttered, thoroughly disgusted. He was grateful to Troi for realizing that he'd need to know these things-- he wouldn't have thought to ask until it became necessary, and if it had become necessary he would have died of embarrassment-- but it was information he heartily wished he could have done without. He also wondered how soon it would become necessary, whether he would know it when it was time, and if he had time to kill himself first.

"It's just a fact of human existence, Q. There's nothing inherently disgusting about it."

"Can we _please_ discuss something else?"

"All right." She showed him the shower controls and the amenities-- toothbrush, beard repressor, skin cleanser, hair cleanser, that sort of thing. "They're all plainly labeled-- if you read the bottles first, you can't get mixed up."

"What if I did get mixed up?"

"Depending on what you did, anything might happen from accidentally shaving your head to poisoning yourself. So be careful and read the bottles first."

"Right. Sure. Got it." Anything to get off this topic. He had to know these things, but the longer they talked about it, the more he felt sick with humiliation and disgust. At least it was Troi doing the explanations. Data probably wouldn't know what many of these things were and Q really would die of embarrassment if he had to talk to any of the others about this sort of thing. "Anything else I need to know?"

"Not really. Call for an escort if you want to go somewhere-- you're not a prisoner in here, but it's not very safe for you out in the halls without an escort. And if you need anything, feel free to call. I'm going off duty now, but I'll still be up for a few hours."

"Right. Thanks. See you later."

After she had gone, Q had the replicator make him an entire new wardrobe, in halfway decent colors. None of the available clothes on the menu were terribly interesting-- what was this fetish for one-piece jumpsuits? He hated one-piece jumpsuits. They were uncomfortable and awfully unflattering. When he excluded one-piece jumpsuits from the menu, there wasn't much left for his wardrobe-- on the other hand, if he was only going to be here a few days he wouldn't have time to do much dressing up. It was probably time to wash-- he had gotten the impression from Troi that humans showered or bathed every day, and he had no desire to be dirty.

He stripped off the gray jumpsuit and tossed it in a chute that he hoped led to the incinerator, went into the bathroom and attempted to figure out the shower. Troi had shown him how the controls worked, but that didn't stop him from first drenching himself in freezing water and then scalding himself before he figured out how to modulate the temperature properly. He then discovered that getting either hair cleanser or beard repressor in one's eyes was agonizingly painful, something Troi had neglected to warn him about. Terrified that he had just blinded himself, Q staggered out of the shower, slammed his knee on the toilet, slipped on the way out and fell on his face on the carpet in the bedroom, and fumbled around desperately for his combadge, with burning eyes tightly closed. When his fingers finally closed on the device, he called sickbay, panicked, and was told that he could solve the problem himself by running clean water over his eyes. Still blind, he stumbled back into the bathroom, slipped on wet tiles and cracked his head against the sink, and finally managed to crawl back into the shower, where he discovered that the remedy was almost as painful as the problem itself. After he eventually managed to get his eyes open again, he discovered that they were a bright and nasty red. And they still hurt besides.

Overall, it was not the most successful of his experiments.

As he dried himself, trying to be careful of the bruises he'd just collected, he discovered a new symptom-- an uncomfortable pressure in his lower abdomen. It didn't feel anything at all like hunger. He thought of calling sickbay, and then remembered Crusher's tone of long-suffering patience about to wear out. Maybe he didn't want to call sickbay after all. He had the computer here-- perhaps he could figure it out for himself.

He asked the computer to display a schematic of human male anatomy, with the various systems and their functions labeled and described. He then compared the location of the uncomfortable pressure to the schematic, figured out what part of his body was generating the sensation, and felt sick again. Now he was awfully glad he hadn't called sickbay.

Trying very hard not to think about what he was doing and how utterly repulsive it was, he attempted to use the facilities in the bathroom. This was even less successful than the showering experiment-- he somehow managed to splash urine on himself. That was the last straw. His stomach heaved, his throat burned, and he found himself vomiting up the food he'd eaten before. The sight and smell of the partially digested food sickened him further. He retched again, and again, until there was nothing coming up anymore.

Sick and weak, overwhelmed by the horror of his new existence, with his gut twisted and burning, he curled up in a fetal ball on the floor of the bathroom and whimpered for several minutes. Eventually he realized that he couldn't simply lie here-- someone had to clean this mess up, and he was too utterly humiliated to ask anyone else to do it, though he supposed there were probably janitor robots or cleaning people or somesuch. He turned the shower back on, crawled into it to rinse himself off, and then stepped back out, gingerly avoiding the puddles on the floor. The toilet had already cleaned and rinsed itself. He took the towels, put them into the shower, and then threw them sopping wet on the floor, covering up the puddles of vomit. Carefully he scrunched them together, trying to make sure he got all the material and didn't have to touch or look at any of it, rolled up the towels with the filth inside, and threw them down the chute as well. There were puddles of water all over the floor now, but he could live with that.

Now, of course, he had no towels. He limped back out into the bedroom and requested towels from the replicator. Half of them he threw on the bathroom floor again, to soak up the water; he dried himself with another pair and then threw those onto the floor as well. He dumped the dripping towels down the chute and got more clean dry ones from the replicator, which he hung up in the bathroom. He then left the bathroom and pressed the button to shut its door, closing the place and the horrors it had generated away and wishing its door could be slammed. It would feel very satisfying to slam a door around now.

Back in the main room of his quarters, Q got dressed and threw himself on the bed. He felt weak and shaky, and he spent several minutes staring at the ceiling and trying to blank his horrible experience out of his mind. After a few minutes, he managed to regain a bit of his equilibrium, and his mouth twitched into a half-smile. At least it couldn't possibly get any worse than that. He had just experienced the depths of human existence; nothing could frighten him anymore. That was a positive thing in some lights, he supposed.

Though his stomach still hurt from throwing up, he became aware of a different, more familiar pain in it. He was apparently hungry again-- which made sense, since he had just lost any value he'd have gotten from his meal earlier. Resolutely he got up and called up a map of the _Enterprise_ on the computer, tracing a route to Ten-Forward. After what he'd just been through, dealing with Guinan would be child's play. On his way out the door, he remembered that Troi had suggested that he go nowhere without an escort-- that it "wasn't safe". He snorted. _Is she afraid I'll make my way to the transporter room and accidentally beam myself into space, or what? _He didn't need an escort-- as long as he kept the route memorized he'd be fine.

* * *

On the way, he tried to decide what he'd get to eat. The thought of eating anything from the meal he'd had before nauseated him-- even the chocolate sundae, which was a damned shame. He'd really liked the chocolate sundae, at least until his head started to hurt. By throwing up his meal, though, he seemed to have convinced his body that the food he'd eaten before was inherently nauseating. He hoped this was a temporary effect-- he'd hate to think he'd never get to eat a chocolate sundae again.

None of this answered the question of what to eat. He had no idea what was available outside the foods Counselor Troi had ordered for him. When he got there, he looked around, trying to determine what other people were eating. Ten-Forward was fairly full at this hour, but most people were nursing drinks. Finally Q located a crewman in a gold uniform eating something that didn't look nauseating. He approached the man and asked, "Excuse me, what are you eating?"

The man looked up at him. "A ham sandwich."

"Okay. If I wanted to get one of those, what would I say? Just ask for a ham sandwich?"

"A ham sandwich with lettuce and tomato." The crewman's eyes narrowed. "Aren't you Q?"

"Brilliant deduction, Sherlock. However did you figure that one out?"

The crewman-- from his pips he was an ensign-- said, "Because the only other person who'd be that clueless about how to do something would be Commander Data, and he doesn't eat. I heard he and LaForge nearly got killed trying to protect you."

"Data got hurt. Nothing happened to LaForge."

"Uh-huh." The ensign took a bite of his sandwich. "What I'd like to know is why they bothered. After what you put us through, you deserved to get fried."

Q scowled. It angered him that a person he didn't even know would so casually pass judgment on him. "Thank you. It's good to know I have friends I can count on here," he said sarcastically. "What's your name, ensign?"

"Nichols," the man said through a mouthful of food.

"Well, Ensign Nichols, when I get my powers back I'll be sure and remember you, and your kind words."

"You won't get them back," Nichols said. "You're too much of an asshole."

"If it makes you feel secure to believe that, go right ahead," Q told him. "You humans are so good at self-delusion. Far be it for me to stand in your way."

He turned aside, smiling. Hopefully that would give the wretch something to lose sleep over.

There was no sign of Guinan, which was encouraging. Right now he wasn't particularly afraid of Guinan, but there was no sense borrowing trouble. Q walked up to the counter and asked the waitress for a ham sandwich with lettuce and tomato.

What she gave him bore no resemblance to what Ensign Nichols had been eating. Q stared at the bowl-- noodles and bits of meat in an orange-colored sauce. "This isn't what I ordered."

"It's a house specialty," the waitress said. "Compliments of the hostess."

Which meant Guinan. Q stared at it. "Now I have to worry about it being poisoned," he complained. "Or repulsive in some fashion."

"It isn't poisoned and it isn't repulsive," the waitress said tightly. "You want me to take a few bites and show you?"

"Be my guest." He pushed the plate back at her.

The waitress took another fork from under the counter and scooped up some of the noodles, which she ate with apparent gusto. Of course, Guinan could have trained her to do that. Cautiously Q sniffed the food-- it smelled perfectly good. He took a tentative forkful. Tasted good, too-- but this was Guinan. There had to be something wrong with it. "I don't want this."

"Then you're not getting anything," the waitress snapped. "Take it or leave it."

He was very hungry. Q took another tentative bite. Nothing seemed to be wrong with it. "If this turns out to be a plot to humiliate me, I'm going to complain to Captain Picard," he announced, and pulled the plate back.

The waitress snorted and left. Q ignored her, concentrating on the food, trying to figure out what the catch was. Maybe it was infected with some annoying human disease, like the common cold-- nothing dangerous, but humiliating and unpleasant. He was uncomfortably aware that this was Guinan's territory, her arena, and if he wanted to eat he was going to have to face whatever she had planned for him. Suddenly it no longer seemed like such a good idea to have come to Ten-Forward-- there had to be somewhere else on the ship he could get a meal. Did the towel and uniform replicator make food too? Probably it did, he realized. He hadn't needed to come here at all. He could leave and get a meal in his quarters.

A shadow fell on him from behind. He turned, and tensed. Too late to leave now. "I knew you'd show up sooner or later."

"How do you like the meal?" Guinan asked coolly.

"It's quite good, actually. What's the catch?" He narrowed his eyes, studying her. "A disease? A slow-acting drug? Some ingredient humans are allergic to?"

"Nothing like that. I'm not you. Don't you recognize it?"

"Can't say I do. Am I supposed to?"

"It's from my homeworld," she said softly. Then she said something else, in another language, and Q cursed inwardly. He knew perfectly well what the language was. He could remember a time when he spoke it fluently, with Guinan herself, under the name she had had then and in the body and name he had worn at that time. But he couldn't remember it, and he had no idea what she had just said. His lack of comprehension must have shown on his face. "You don't remember that either?"

There was no way to dissemble. "Apparently not," Q said, hating to make the admission. Of all people to show weakness to!

"Guess you're getting senile in your old age," Guinan said.

"Obviously it wasn't a priority with me, or I would have remembered," Q replied, matching her coolness.

"Obviously." Guinan leaned over him. "I said, it's a meal from a dead world, now."

"If you're trying to make me feel guilty, you're being resoundingly unsuccessful. I did far more for you than your miserable world deserved."

Her voice turned ice-cold. "You gave me a completely useless warning."

"Hardly completely useless. You were off-planet when the Borg came, weren't you?"

"Trying to find out the nature of the disaster that was coming."

"Even still. If I hadn't told you what I did, you wouldn't have realized there was a disaster coming at all. You would have been on your homeworld, and you'd have died with the rest of them. I saved your pathetic life."

"Which makes us even." Her eyes narrowed. "Or did you forget that too?"

"That? No. I'm hardly likely to forget _that_."

"Didn't think you would," she said. "I terrified you. You had no idea you could be threatened."

Q shrugged. "Disturbed me. That, I'll admit."

"You were disturbed before you saw what I can do. You were terrified after."

Q did not like the turn this conversation had taken. He had wanted very much to forget that Guinan existed, after his first encounter with her. He had also wanted very much to get revenge-- he could not forgive what she had done to him, and yet he hadn't dared to take any direct action. Guinan's powers were limited in comparison to his, and not nearly so versatile, but her people had abilities even the Q didn't share-- abilities that made her capable of destroying, or at least neutralizing, him. He had been forced to agree not to interfere with her people, pressured by both the Continuum and Guinan herself; there was no direct way he could move against her.

A few years later he'd seen the perfect opportunity. He had warned her, in as vague terms as he possibly could, of an upcoming disaster that would destroy her people, and offered to save them if she would meet his price. Of course she wouldn't, as he'd known she wouldn't. Her own abilities could confirm the little that he'd told her-- she could see that most of her people would die, but not why, or how. So she'd gone off-world, desperately searching for a way to avert the disaster, and while she was gone the Borg had come and destroyed her home. From a safe distance he'd watched the agony of her guilt, and been gleefully satisfied-- she would always be tormented by the fact that she'd refused his offer. And there was no way that what he'd done-- give a warning, offer to help-- could possibly be construed as against the terms of the treaty the Continuum had made with her people. He had had the perfect revenge, and his own hands were spotless.

He had never expected to be in a position where she could pay him back.

Q stood up and pushed his chair away, facing Guinan. "Is there some point to this?"

"I knew this was going to happen to you, you know," she said. "I've known it for some time."

He stared at her. "What do you mean?"

"I saw this when I first met you. I didn't know what to make of it then. Then last year, when you came to the _Enterprise_, I realized you were going to become mortal."

Once, he had known exactly how she could have "seen" this, though his own powers over time had been very different from Guinan's. Now they were just words that he had to take for granted. "So you knew. I'm impressed."

"I arranged for you to come here."

That was a different story. Q was incredulous. "_How? _There's no way-- You couldn't have done that. I was still a Q when I decided to come here-- you couldn't have influenced me..."

"Believe what you like. I told you, I know more than one trick."

He swallowed, and stepped back slightly, the counter pressing into his back. If she had _that_ kind of power... well, it wasn't his concern anymore. Let the Continuum worry about it. "I'm sure Picard will be thrilled to hear that you brought me here."

"Captain Picard would understand my reasons."

"And those are? Simply the desire to gloat over my misfortune?"

"That, too," Guinan said candidly. "Mainly I wanted to do this."

Without warning, she brought her knee up hard into his crotch.

His entire abdominal region imploded, a black hole at the core of him tearing his flesh inward. For a split second, there was no pain, just awful numbness. Then the pain hit, a crippling wave of nauseated agony. His knees buckled, and he sank to the floor doubled over, with a gasp that would have been more like a scream if he'd been able to get a breath. It was impossible to breathe through the horrible pain and nausea-- what air he could get came in as gasps, and what he could breathe out left as whimpers. Guinan had killed him. He had to have massive internal injuries, be hemorrhaging to death-- it was the only explanation for the hideous pain and sickness, worse than anything he'd yet experienced. He had completely misjudged her. Even knowing how much she hated him, it had never occurred to him that she would kill him.

"I haven't killed you," Guinan said coldly-- had he said anything? He didn't think he had. "It's not my way. Besides, the longer you live, the longer you'll suffer."

She bent down, coming toward him. Q flinched away violently, curling into a ball and gasping, "--_Don't--_"

A look of contempt crossed Guinan's face. She straightened up. "You really do have 'victim' painted on your forehead," she said. "If I didn't know better, I'd almost feel sorry for you."

She turned and walked away. Q lay on the floor, trying desperately to breathe regularly again. Despite what she'd said, he was still positive he had massive internal injuries. He had to get to sickbay. He tried to struggle onto his feet, or at least his knees, but the pain wouldn't let him move properly yet.

"Uh, Guinan?" It was LaForge's voice, close by.

"Yes?" Guinan's voice replied.

"Someone's going to have to take him to sickbay now."

"He's not hurt-- but go right ahead."

A hand landed on Q's arm. He turned his head and saw Geordi LaForge, kneeling next to him. "Q. Can you walk?"

"She's killed me," Q gasped. "I'm dying."

"I doubt it. Now come on. Get up and walk." LaForge tugged his arm. "I'm not carrying you to sickbay."

With LaForge's help, Q managed to stagger to his feet. "I don't think... I should walk. I must have tremendous internal injuries."

"No, you probably just feel like you do. Come on."

"How... do you know? This pain... it's unbelievable. Something's got to be broken inside."

LaForge actually smiled. "Welcome to the wonderful world of testicles, Q."

* * *

With an obvious lack of sympathy, LaForge forced Q to walk to sickbay, where they met Dr. Crusher on her way out the door. She sighed in exasperation. "What's wrong with him this time?" she asked LaForge.

"Guinan kicked him in the crotch. I don't think he's badly hurt, but I thought someone should check."

"What do you mean, not badly hurt?" Q demanded. He was still hunched over, leaning on LaForge's shoulder for support. "I'm in agony! The Calamarain didn't hurt this badly and they were _killing_ me!"

"Right," Crusher said. "Lie down over there." She pointed at a bed and turned to LaForge. "Thanks, Geordi. You can go now if you want."

"No problem." LaForge helped Q to the bed, then left.

Crusher took her own sweet time in coming over to the bed. Q, curled up on his side, glared at her. "I'm glad to see you're in no rush."

"I was on my way out the door to go off-shift, actually." She ran the medical tricorder over him. "You're fine, nothing but bruises. You'll be sore for a few hours, but that's the extent of it."

"If there's nothing wrong with me then how can it possibly hurt so much?"

"A lot of nerve endings," Crusher said distractedly. She studied her tricorder readings. "Where did you get all these other bruises?"

"Which ones?"

"You're covered with them."

"Falling three meters to the floor of Engineering probably had something to do with it," Q said, unwilling to admit how clumsy he'd been in the shower. Besides, falling three meters to the floor of Engineering probably was where most of them came from, anyway.

"According to this you need to get some sleep. You feel tired?"

Q scowled. "I'm in too much pain to feel tired," he said, trying to determine whether he did or not. "I don't feel anything like I did when I fell asleep."

"When did you last sleep?"

He thought about it. "I don't remember. I was asleep when the first Calamarain probe happened, if that helps."

"That was over 20 hours ago." Crusher frowned. "Describe what you felt when you first fell asleep."

"I was afraid I was dying." He thought back, remembering. "I felt weak... my limbs were too heavy to move. I felt as if the life were draining out of me. I couldn't see straight... I think I fell on the bed and lost consciousness. This was in the brig. Picard said I fell asleep."

"You didn't," Crusher said. "You were drugged."

"_Drugged?_" Outraged, Q tried to sit up, and fell back down again as the pain stabbed through him. "Aah!"

"I think the captain's going to want to have words with the security guard on duty when you were in the brig," Crusher said, half-smiling. "There's trace elements of a soporific gas in your system."

"Then-- I didn't fall asleep. I _haven't_ experienced sleep yet."

"Not real sleep, no." She walked around the bed, so he had to roll over to continue looking at her. "You're overdue, though. Go home and get some rest."

"How can you tell?"

"To begin with, your blood fatigue poisons are up. Your neurotransmitter levels are showing an exhaustion pattern. Most importantly, though, you've been up for over 20 hours, with only a drugged nap before that, and you've had a strenuous day." She put her tricorder away.

"I don't feel tired."

"Do you have any idea what being tired feels like?" Crusher said, again in that tone of long-suffering patience.

Q realized belatedly that if he couldn't go by his experience in the brig then he probably did have no idea what being tired felt like. "I don't know."

"Arms and legs starting to feel a bit heavy? Is it more comfortable to lie and rest?"

"Yes, but I thought that was because of what Guinan did."

"Your voice is a little hoarse. Can you hear the difference?"

"I'm not sure--"

"Difficulty concentrating? Difficulty focusing vision? Headache?"

"Some of those."

"You're tired," Crusher said firmly. "I'd suggest you get into a schedule. When you wake up tomorrow, check the time, and go to bed sixteen hours after that whether you think you're tired or not. Being tired's rather subtle-- human children have to be put to bed on a schedule, because they often can't tell when they should sleep and overtire themselves. You'll probably have the same problem for a few weeks."

"Oh, marvelous. What happens if I get overtired?"

"You'll be more irritable than usual-- which in your case, probably means you'll provoke someone into punching you. I'd advise getting regular sleep. I'd also advise that as soon as you have some free time, look up a book on the computer called _Man's Body-- An Owner's Manual_, and read it. It'll save you a lot of useless trips to sickbay." She turned to a nurse. "Take Q back to his quarters, please."

"Right."

"Aren't you going to give me a painkiller or something? I'm still in terrible pain."

Crusher sighed. "All right." She picked up a hypo and pressed it against his arm. "Now, I'm going home for the night. Try not to have any medical emergencies-- Dr. Raskin's on night duty, and he's likely to be a lot less sympathetic to you than I am."

"Is that possible?"

"He lost his lover when the Borg attacked," Crusher said tightly.

"Oh." Q nodded. It was probably a good idea to avoid sickbay tonight. It was unfair for the _Enterprise_ crew to blame him for the lives lost to the Borg-- but they weren't half as strong on fairness as they liked to pretend.

* * *

In his quarters, he lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling, wondering how one went about falling asleep. Last time it had just happened-- sleep, or at least drugged unconsciousness, had overwhelmed him against his will. That didn't seem about to happen. He thought back, and remembered being unable to keep his eyes open-- weren't closed eyes associated with sleep and unconsciousness? Q tried closing his eyes and staring at the blank expanse of reddish dark that action produced. Nothing.

All right, next step. Maybe he needed to be wearing specific nightclothes. He knew that humans often put on different clothes to go to bed. He got up and checked the replicator menu. There were nightgowns, nightdresses, pajamas, sleepers, and lingerie, most of which was marked "f". The pajamas seemed similar to what he wore when awake, but with softer, lighter material. He ordered a set of two-piece pajamas in red and black-- he was awfully fond of red and black-- put them on, lay back down and tried again. No luck.

There was something he was leaving out here, wasn't there? Q tried to remember his study of human life. He hadn't been interested in how they supported their biological existences, paying more attention to their politics, religions and emotional lives-- the interesting stuff. About the only mundane things he'd bothered to look at were speech patterns and clothing. But he had to have noticed _something_ about the way they slept-- darkness! Of course! He turned off the light and lay back down. Most humans preferred to sleep in semitotal darkness. That was what he'd left out.

It was difficult to get comfortable. He tried lying on his side, his back and his stomach. The stomach, he quickly discovered, was a bad idea-- the bouts with nausea and the injury Guinan had given him had made his entire abdominal region ache. The painkiller Crusher had given him mostly muted the ache, but putting pressure on it was definitely a bad idea. Lying on his side, with one arm curled up beside his body and the other underneath the pillow and his head, seemed to be the most comfortable position until the arm under the pillow started tingling. He tried to move it and discovered an awful, nauseating prickling sensation that shot through his entire arm. When he kept it totally still, it felt unpleasantly numb. Instinctively he reached for his combadge with his good arm to call sickbay. Two things stopped him-- the memory of Crusher's warning and the awful prickling sensation again, overwhelming him as he accidentally moved his other arm.

Time to use the computer. "Computer, lights on!" They obligingly came on, blinding him. He blinked in pain and covered his eyes with his good arm. "Look up the following medical symptoms in arms: numbness, prickling sensations, pain, nausea generated by moving one's arm, and tell me the most simple explanation that handles all the symptoms."

"Define most simple."

Q sighed theatrically. "The most normal. The least life-threatening. This is probably something perfectly normal for humans-- so far it seems everything has been."

"Possible explanation: Loss of circulation to injured limb. Possible explanation: Neural damage to injured limb. Possible explanation: Loss of injured limb. Possible--"

"Stop. What causes a loss of circulation? I want the most normal, least life-threatening explanation first."

"Steady pressure on limb can result in loss of circulation."

Steady pressure like resting his head on it for ten minutes, possibly? "If loss of circulation is caused by steady pressure, how do you restore circulation?"

"Moving injured limb will restore circulation and eliminate symptoms."

Lovely. Q tried moving it, tentatively. The unpleasant sensation came back, worse than ever. Experimentally he tried taking the limb with his other hand and moving it back and forth manually. That was a lot less painful. Soon he found that the sensation had dwindled to the point where he could move the arm itself without feeling sick. Each motion seemed to hurt a bit less, until ordinary feeling was restored. "Computer, lights off." He lay on his back and tried to find a comfortable place to put his arms. Throwing one across the bed and the other over his head seemed to be comfortable, but made him feel exposed and vulnerable. He tried pulling the blankets up over him, and discovered that they decreased the feeling of vulnerability by a good bit.

Fine. He had a comfortable position, the lights were out, his eyes were closed. Why wasn't he asleep yet?

The bruise on his knee, from bumping into the toilet, began to ache. Then the bruise on his side, from when the Calamarain had first attacked and he'd fallen to the floor of Ten-Forward. Then the bruises on his back and shoulders from falling to the floor of Engineering, the second time the Calamarain had attacked. Apparently his painkillers were wearing off.

Exasperated, Q sat up. It could not possibly be this difficult for humans to fall asleep. According to the chronometer, he had been working at this for an hour or two, and felt no closer to sleep than before. He picked up his combadge. Sickbay was out of the question and both Troi and Crusher had implied they would be going to sleep. Data wouldn't be asleep, but Data didn't sleep, and probably couldn't offer much advice on how to do it. Q called Picard.

"Picard here." The voice sounded hoarse and slightly bleary.

"Picard, how do you fall asleep?"

There was a moment of silence. Then, "Is this Q?"

"Well, of course it is."

The sound of a deep breath being taken. "How does one fall asleep."

"That's right. I've been trying for hours."

"To begin with," Picard said, in a tone that indicated his patience had run out, "one avoids being called by formerly omnipotent entities in the middle of the night."

"Oh. Did I wake you?"

"Do you have any idea what time it is?!"

Q looked over at the chronometer. "0100 hours, is what the clock says."

"0100 hours. Exactly. Well into shipboard night. You can safely assume that everyone on the day shift except for Data is asleep at this hour. Humans who are asleep do _not_ appreciate being woken up before the appropriate time, which in my case is 0600 hours. Five entire hours from now. Now _go to sleep, Q!_"

"_How?_ If I knew how to go to sleep, I'd be asleep already!"

"Count sheep," Picard snapped in exasperation.

"_What_ sheep?" Q asked, bewildered.

The link was silent. Picard had cut him off.

Q replaced his combadge on the nighttable and stared up into the darkness of the bedroom, feeling strangely lonely. There wasn't anyone else he could call for help. The sudden quiet after the sound of a human voice was somehow more silent than the room had been before he'd called Picard, and the absence of any other presence, human or otherwise, seemed far more pronounced now. All he could hear was his own breathing and a far-distant hum, possibly the warp engines. With blackness around him, silence enveloping him and all the additional senses he'd enjoyed before gone, he felt as if he were cut off from everything.

He shifted slightly, simply to feel himself move, to know that he still existed. For the first time in his life, he was alone, completely trapped within his own mind, without the glow of the Continuum surrounding him, without even anyone to talk to. As far as the universe was concerned, he might not even exist.

His throat tightened, making it difficult to breathe. At the same time, his eyes burned, a similar but not identical sensation to when he'd gotten chemicals in them. His own utter loneliness and helplessness overwhelmed him, and the choking sensation in his throat worsened as his chest grew tight as well. Something blurred his vision. For a panicked second Q reached reflexively for his combadge, fearing that something new and horrible was happening to him. Then he realized there was no one he could call for help-- the unsympathetic Dr. Raskin currently ruled sickbay, and everyone else was asleep. The thought produced a renewed wave of loneliness and despair. His breath came in ragged and uncontrollable, with small unpleasant sounds in it that he couldn't seem to stop, and when he reached his hand to his eyes the hand came away wet.

That explained it, then. He might know little about human biological functions, but he knew how they showed emotion. Wet eyes meant tears. He was crying.

Q turned over and curled up in a ball, clutching the pillow to himself and muffling his sobs in it. He should have been humiliated, mortified to have sunk so low, but he couldn't muster up the strength. The fact was that he _had_ sunk unbelievably far, from the heights of godhead to the lowliest of the low. There was no more room for humiliation in him. He was hurt and exhausted and desperately alone, and he clung to the pillow like a lifeline and cried like an abandoned human child. _Take me back, please. I can't bear this any more. I've learned my lesson, I swear. Oh, please, take me back, take me back..._

* * *

Some time later his whole body jerked, and he opened his eyes to darkness. His pajamas were drenched and sticking to his body, the blankets tangled around him. The chronometer read 0423 hours. His eyes burned, his mouth was dry, his head pounded, and he was trembling uncontrollably.

This was his quarters aboard the _Enterprise_, not the courtroom he'd devised. It had been a hallucination-- a horribly vivid hallucination. _Not insane too_, he moaned silently. _Please don't let me be going insane on top of everything else._

Q struggled out of the bedclothes and changed into one of the outfits he'd had the replicator make him earlier, realized there was no point to doing so because the source of the dampness was his own sweat, undressed again and stumbled into the bathroom. All the bruises he'd acquired yesterday, or today, or whenever it had been, had decided they were going to hurt. The light in the bathroom was acutely painful for a few moments, but his eyes adapted quickly enough. He washed, a bit more proficiently this time, dried himself and drank two glasses of water. He then got dressed in a different outfit and sat down in a chair in his room to decide what to do next. The trembling had lessened slightly, but hadn't entirely gone away.

He had to know what this meant. The things he'd hallucinated had proceeded in a sequence, like a story, but there were nonsensical, illogical gaps and leaps throughout, things he hadn't noticed at the time but that seemed glaringly obvious now. Had one of his people briefly sent him into some sort of mad scenario? Or was he himself going mad? Or was there a perfectly innocent explanation that he simply didn't know? For the thousandth time, he wished he'd picked a different species, or studied what human lives were actually like a bit more carefully. His own ignorance terrified him. But it was still late at night-- Picard had said that he got up at 0600 hours, still 11/2 hours from now, and undoubtedly no one else would be awake either. He considered calling sickbay anyway, Raskin or no-- surely a doctor would be honor-bound to help him despite personal feelings? Then he remembered a bit more human history, realized he was being shockingly naive, and shook his head. Calling sickbay was out of the question.

Data would be awake, though. Assuming the android had been let out of sickbay-- and Q hadn't seen him there earlier-- Data would neither be on duty nor asleep at this hour. At least, Q hoped he wouldn't be on duty. "Computer, give me the status of Commander Data."

"Lieutenant Commander Data is in his quarters."

"Which are where, exactly? Draw me a map."

A schematic of the _Enterprise_ came up, with Data's and Q's quarters and the path between them clearly labeled. Q studied the schematic until he was sure he could make it-- he did not want to have to ask anyone directions-- and then set off. Data might not himself sleep, but he definitely knew more about the condition than Q did. And if Data couldn't explain the hallucinations either, and it became necessary to go to sickbay, Q wanted to have someone he trusted go with him to protect him.

* * *

Data's voice sounded over the intercom. "Come in."

The door slid open, and Q stepped through. Data was sitting at a console, looking up with a slightly puzzled expression on his face. "Q. I am surprised to see you still awake."

"I tried to sleep, but I just had the most horrible experience." He reconsidered. "Well, not the most horrible. This has been a day just chock-full of horrible experiences. But _a_ horrible experience, anyway. I was hoping you could explain what it was."

"I will try," Data said. "What sort of horrible experience did you have?"

Q sat down in a chair across from the console. "I... hallucinated."

"Hallucinated?"

"Only I thought it was real. But it couldn't have been real, because it made no sense."

"Can you describe your hallucination?"

Q nodded. "It's vague now. I'm having a hard time remembering parts of it-- which is just as well, considering how awful it was. But-- I thought I had my powers, and I was going to take Picard back to the 21st century. I don't remember why-- no, I do remember why. I wanted to show him how barbaric humanity could get. And there was this woman with us, and she was Picard's girlfriend, and a friend of mine. But she isn't anyone who really exists. I took all of us back to the 21st century, the post-atomic horror, where I met Guinan and Questioner--"

"Questioner?"

"Queria. Questioner. Whatever she's calling herself. She's another of the Q. When she takes a name in a mortal language, it's usually a variant on 'questioner'. Anyway, she was there, and Guinan. They said that I wasn't allowed to influence time... and they took my powers away. And then the Cleris stormtroopers showed up."

"What are Cleris stormtroopers?"

"The Cleris used to be a particularly nasty race as nasty races go. I remember thinking at the time, 'Wait, this is Earth, not Cleris. Someone else must be interfering.' But I couldn't use my powers. The woman-- I don't remember her name, it started with a V or something-- was insisting that this was some game I was playing, that I had to get us out of there now. She wouldn't believe that I couldn't. Then the stormtroopers killed her." Q frowned. "I felt guilty. Horribly so. As if _I'd_ killed her. I thought of her as a friend... and I couldn't protect her. Then Picard started accusing me of having gotten us into this and gotten her killed. And the stormtroopers took us to a courtroom... and it was mine."

Data tilted his head slightly. "The courtroom that you tried the _Enterprise_ crew in?"

"Yes. Exactly. And someone who was wearing my form-- who looked exactly like I did when I was being the judge-- was being the judge. I told him that I'd reserved that form for my use, that he wasn't allowed to take it. And he laughed, and he said he was me. From the past. And he was putting me on trial for crimes against the Q, or maybe crimes against myself... It was just horrible." Q shuddered. "The stormtroopers were going to shoot me... and then I was back in my bedroom aboard the _Enterprise_. I don't understand any of it. Did someone send me into some cruel scenario? Did any of it really happen?"

"What you experienced was most certainly a dream, Q."

"A dream."

Data nodded solemnly. "Yes. Dreaming is a fundamental part of the human sleep cycle. Since the dream you experienced was unpleasant, it might be more precisely described as a nightmare."

Q nodded. "That sounds about right." A horrible thought suddenly struck him. "Wait a minute. You mean I'm going to have to go through this _every night?_"

"If you mean to ask if you will dream every night, then yes. Humans invariably dream several times in a sleep cycle. However, some humans remember none of their dreams, and few remember all. Moreover, only a small percentage of dreams are nightmares, or bad dreams. Though I cannot speak from personal experience, I have observed that most humans find the act of dreaming to be overall a pleasurable experience. The sort of disturbing scenario you describe is relatively rare."

"What percentage? How many of these nightmares can I expect to have?"

"I know of no way to determine that." Data cocked his head, thinking about it. "While I know of no studies that have been done on the subject, it is axiomatic among humans that emotional stress can produce nightmares."

"Oh, wonderful!" Q sank back in the chair. "Data, I'm probably going to be under emotional stress for the rest of my life!"

"For your sake, I hope you are wrong," Data said, sounding slightly concerned-- though maybe that was Q's imagination. Could Data feel concerned? "Emotional stress is very damaging to humans, both physically and mentally. If, as you believe, you suffer from emotional stress for the rest of your life, I am afraid that life will be significantly shortened."

"Yes, well, I expected that." Q studied the floor for a moment. The depression threatened to overwhelm him again. Quickly he looked up, back at Data. "Tell me something, Data. Why _did_ you save my life, before?"

"It would not have been ethical to do otherwise."

"Ah. So you would've done the same for anyone."

"That is correct."

"How do you feel?"

Data seemed to consider. "I am functioning within normal parameters. Though the process to restore me to function was time-consuming and labor-intensive, it seems to have been completely successful. I am not aware of any lingering damage."

"Well, that's good."

"Thank you. How do _you_ feel?"

"Miserable." Q hunched over slightly in his chair. "Somewhere I seem to have managed to pick up at least one bruise on every major body part, my stomach still hurts and my head is killing me. If you're asking if there's any lingering effects from the Calamarain, though, I don't think so-- though so much of the rest of me hurts that I'm not sure I'd be able to tell."

"I am sorry to hear that." Data studied Q. "I have noticed that you look unwell. Your eyes, for instance, are inflamed. Do they feel sore?"

"Yeah. I got soap in them before." Q imagined the fact that he'd spent however long it had been bawling like a baby probably had something to do with it too, but he wasn't about to admit that part, not even to Data. "This whole day-- how long has it been, anyway? Since I came aboard?"

"33 hours and 52 minutes."

"Well, then, this whole day and a half has been absolutely the worst day of my entire existence." He looked at the floor again. "Data, I'm grateful to you for saving my life-- don't think I'm not-- but next time, don't bother."

Data frowned slightly in puzzlement. "Why not?"

"Because it's just not worth it."

"I see." Data leaned forward slightly. "Q, I do not mean to pry, but it is important that I know. Are you in danger of taking your own life?"

Q stared at Data for several seconds incredulously, and then began to laugh. Data seemed confused. "I did not intend a joke. Have I unintentionally said something funny?"

"Oh, Data," Q laughed. "I may be stunningly ignorant of human biology and customs, but not even I am that astonishingly naive."

"Was the question inappropriate?"

Q sobered. "No. It was a perfectly appropriate question, assuming you'd get a straight answer-- but the odds against me giving a straight answer to that question are pretty low."

"I do not understand."

"Let me clarify, then. If I were to say yes, you'd try to stop me. Am I right?"

"Yes."

"I thought so. You'd put me on a suicide watch or something, right? Well, we'll ignore the question of your ethical right to stop me or lack thereof for now, and analyze what I'm likely to say in response. If I _did_ plan to kill myself, I'd be a fool to tell you so-- you'd stop me. So if the truthful answer was yes, I'd reply no. On the other hand, if I just wanted to get attention, I might well say yes."

"Are there any circumstances under which you would answer the question truthfully?" Data asked.

Q sighed. "For what it's worth, these circumstances." He smiled briefly. "Having just told you you can't trust me to give you a straight answer, I'm now about to ask you to trust that I'm doing so. I am utterly and completely miserable and likely to remain so for the duration of my human life-- but I've been told that if I stick it out, my people might take me back. I'm not about to give up my chance at getting my powers back."

"So there is some chance, then."

"That's what they told me."

"I am glad for you."

Q looked at Data, startled. "Are you? Really?"

"Not really. I am incapable of feeling glad. But I have observed that when humans have an opportunity that gives them pleasure, it is polite to express happiness for them."

"Right." Q studied Data for a second or two, frowning. "Considering what I've done to you and your friends, if you _did_ have emotions, you probably wouldn't be glad anyway."

"If you do not truly desire to die, why did you ask me not to save you should you be endangered again?"

"Because I'm depressed, and I'm likely to say stupid, illogical things for as long as I'm depressed."

"Ah. So you did not truly mean it."

"No-- yes. In a way. If I'm in danger again, and you can save me without any risk to yourself, by all means, please do. But if it involves risking your own life-- that's when not to bother."

"Why not?"

"It'd be a foolish waste. You're enjoying your life a great deal more than I'm enjoying mine."

"Q, I am not sure you understand. I am an android. I do not actually feel enjoyment."

"Yeah, well, zero is still considerably larger than negative six billion, isn't it?"

Data frowned quizzically at Q, who elucidated. "Whatever it is you get out of living, you're getting more of it than I am. And I don't want to owe a debt like that. I already owe you more than I'm going to get a chance to pay back unless I get my powers back."

"I am not tallying up debts," Data said.

"Maybe you're not. I'm sure everyone else on this ship is. I have enough problems without everyone deciding to blame me for your death or something."

"I see. Should the situation arise again, I will consider your wishes. However, I cannot promise that I will be able to honor them." Data hesitated for a moment. "It is very late. I think it would be best if you went to sleep soon."

Oh. Or in other words, Data had better things to do than talk to Q. "Am I to take it that you're kicking me out?"

Data tilted his head slightly, seeming puzzled. "'Kicking you out'?"

"I'm interrupting something of no doubt vital importance that you want to get back to, so you're trying to shoo me away. Right?"

"Ah. I see your meaning. No, I am not trying to 'shoo you away'. I am perfectly capable of holding a conversation with you and simultaneously attending to the task I am performing. Actually, I am finding our conversation most intriguing. I have never before encountered a being who has been transformed into a human from some other state. I had not considered the difficulties such a transformation would entail, and the problems you bring up have given me some insight into the human condition. It seems that I know more about being human than I had thought, a circumstance which I find gratifying to discover."

"Oh. Well, I'm glad _somebody's_ getting something out of this."

"Yes. It is not my desire to curtail this discussion; I simply mean that it would be best for you to sleep. If you entrain your sleep schedule to the day period, you will consistently be awake when all the regular crew aside from myself are asleep, which will present difficulties for you. It might be best for you to sleep now, and attempt to entrain yourself to a regular day/night cycle."

"I don't want to go to sleep." Q leaned back in the chair slightly, folding his arms in tightly, as if wrapping himself in them. "The last time I tried, I..." _Was overwhelmed with existential angst and started bawling like an infant._ "...I felt very... lonely. It was as if, all of a sudden, I was completely alone in the universe. As if no one else existed-- as if I myself might not exist. It's not an experience I'm eager to repeat."

"I see." Data considered. "Humans often suffer a period of extreme emotional vulnerability in the earliest hours of the morning. Feelings of loneliness, despair and fear are not uncommon at such times. It is as if the normal defenses of the mind are weakened by exhaustion and by the physiological depression in circadian rhythms accompanying that time period."

"What do humans normally do about it?"

"One solution is to do as you are, and hold a conversation with someone else. A more productive solution, resulting in effective sleep, might be to listen to relaxing music, or to sleep with the light on. These are recommended solutions for individuals suffering from insomnia associated with depression, stress or fear of the dark."

"I thought you had to have the lights off to go to sleep."

"No. While many humans prefer to sleep in darkness, it is not a necessary condition."

"Oh. Thanks. I'll try that." Q considered getting up and going back to his room to do so, but the chair was very comfortable, he didn't feel like moving, and Data's advice or no, he still didn't want to face being alone again. "You've really helped me a lot, Data. I don't know what I would have done without you."

"You would undoubtedly have consulted someone else."

From anyone else, it would have been a sarcastic or facetious comment. From Data, it was simply a statement of fact. "Yes, but... they wouldn't have been as much help."

Data seemed surprised. "Surely a human would be better able to counsel you through the difficulties being human presents than I could. I have no experience of the things I have advised you on. It is very possible that my advice could be unintentionally misleading or incomplete."

"That's not why. Certainly they'd be _able_ to give me better advice than you can, but they _wouldn't_. They'd get impatient. Or judge me. Or refuse to help, or give deliberately misleading advice. Data, with your ethical programming, and your desire to match up to your ideal of humanity, and without human emotions like anger or resentment to cloud the issue, you're a lot more compassionate than most human beings. Even Counselor Troi, with all her talk about how this is supposed to be a learning experience for me. I'm sure she's secretly filled with glee at watching me struggle. Picard just wants to get rid of me. None of them except for you are really willing to give me the time of day." He felt his throat tightening with emotion again, and cursed inwardly. _Oh, no. I'm not breaking that far again._ Q drew a deep breath and took refuge in anger. "You're the only one I'll miss out of everyone on this forsaken starship."

"Then you must be looking forward to transferring to starbase 56."

Q stared. "It's been decided already?" he asked, and heard a tremor in his own voice. "Well. Picard certainly doesn't waste any time, does he."

"Captain Picard is remarkably efficient. It is one of the traits that make him such an effective starship commander." Data studied Q. "You appear to be somewhat distressed."

"I-- you could say that."

"Are you apprehensive about the transfer?"

Q laughed sharply. "'Apprehensive' doesn't begin to describe it, Data. Try stark raving terror."

Data frowned. "I do not understand. Why should you fear leaving a place where you feel that people dislike you?"

"I don't _know_ anybody there. At least you people are the devil I know. I chose to come to the _Enterprise_, you know." He remembered what Guinan had said, and decided to ignore it. At least he could preserve the illusion of having had free will. Besides, Guinan could well have lied. She was good at that. "Of all the mortal groups I've recently interacted with, I had the most hopes for this one. I thought... Well, it doesn't matter what I thought. But how many times am I going to get kicked out of something? The way things are going, I won't be at the starbase long, either. They'll throw me off it. You just watch."

Data nodded. "Ah. You are experiencing the fear of abandonment."

"Well, of course I am!" Q exploded. "My entire _species_ threw me out, Data, I don't think it's unreasonable for me to want stability somewhere, is it?"

"It is certainly understandable. Often humans will fear a potentially positive opportunity because it reminds them of a negative event they have previously experienced. It is obvious why you would fear being abandoned. But that is not the case here. Captain Picard is not abandoning you, Q. It is merely that the most appropriate place for you is not aboard the _Enterprise_." Data leaned forward slightly. "You say that we are 'the devil you know'. The fact that you know no one aboard Starbase 56 is not necessarily a disadvantage, however. It is an opportunity for a fresh start. Perhaps you will find that humans are not quite the devils you think them to be."

"It still feels like Picard's kicking me out," Q muttered.

"I am sorry you feel that way," Data said earnestly. "But I am sure your experiences will be more positive in a place where your past history will not unduly influence people's opinions of you."

"Or in other words, among people I didn't throw tests at," Q murmured. He didn't much feel like continuing the argument. Maybe Data was right and things would be better there. He yawned and closed his eyes, leaning back against the chair's headrest.

"You appear to be very tired. Perhaps you should go to bed."

"I will. In a few minutes. I just want to sit and rest for a moment..." The red from the light made such interesting patterns against his closed eyelids. Why hadn't he noticed that before?

Distantly he was aware of someone shaking him. He opened his eyes and mumbled something. Data was standing over him, looking concerned.

"Q, you have fallen asleep. I think you would be more comfortable if you returned to your room. That chair is not designed for sleeping in."

Had he been asleep? He had no awareness of having lost consciousness. He'd just closed his eyes, and then Data started shaking him. It was a tremendous effort to form words. "Mm. Guess so." The phrase came out slurred, sounding like "gssso" or something.

"I will escort you back to your room."

With an effort of will, Q woke himself up a bit. Was this how it felt to be truly tired? He wanted nothing more than to collapse in the chair and shut out the universe. "Won't be... you don't need to. I won't get lost."

"Perhaps not, but it is unsafe for you to roam the _Enterprise_ unescorted."

"Troi said that too. What do you mean unsafe? I can hardly fall into the warp core by accident."

Data hesitated. "There are members of the crew who lost friends and family to the Borg, in the encounter you provoked. They may well blame you for their loss. Starfleet personnel are trained to place personal feelings aside for the sake of duty... it would, however, be reckless to place undue burdens on people."

Q hadn't considered that at all. And he should have, after the encounters with Nichols and Guinan, after being warned about Dr. Raskin. He was wasting much too much time fearing things that were normal for humans and ignoring real and present dangers to his well-being. Something else he had to be grateful to Data for. "Oh... I hadn't thought... I must be stupid with exhaustion. Thanks."

He was barely aware of the trip back to his room. Without Data supporting him, he might not have made it, might have collapsed from exhaustion and curled up to sleep on the corridor floor. Through the haze of oncoming sleep, he was aware of Data helping him to bed. He tried to mutter another thanks, shamed at his own incompetence, but it was difficult to form words and it probably didn't matter anyway. The moment he hit the bed, sleep drowned him.

So much for his first day of being human.

* * *

Data had helped him with so many things, but about the starbase, he'd been dead wrong.

Q would be the first to admit that he had, perhaps, not gone as far out of his way as he could to be pleasant when he'd first come to Starbase 56. He hadn't been able to shake the feeling of being abandoned, and he'd been in a miserable mood when he'd arrived-- besides, humans expected too much of him. They had all spent their entire lives interacting with each other in a social context, trying to make fellow humans-- or fellow sentients, in the case of non-humans-- like them. Q's social experience was entirely different. In the Continuum, everyone automatically knew what everyone else was thinking. Often relationships with fellow Q were superficially antagonistic-- it was one of the ways the younger Q maintained their individuality against the pressure of the Continuum overmind. As for his relationships with mortals, while he had in the past taken on some outwardly pleasant roles, most of his experience was with playing the devil's advocate, the trickster, the tester of limits. That had been his chosen role, to study mortals by challenging and antagonizing them. Now that he _was_ human, few people made allowances for where his experience lay. They were too limited to recognize his attempts to make emotional contact. After a while he stopped trying, by which time he was thoroughly despised by every last soul on the starbase.

There was also the fact that the work he'd taken on was outrageously difficult. His intelligence had, of course, been lowered tremendously by his transformation. There were concepts he had understood with ease once, that now he could no longer even remember. Anything his mortal brain couldn't handle, he had lost the knowledge of. So anything he remembered and understood had to be something that it was at least theoretically possible for humanoid mortals to comprehend.

It was something of a boost to his ego to discover how much more he understood than the scientists who came to him; he might be human, but at least he was a human genius. However, as much of an ego boost as it might be, it was a definite disadvantage in teaching. The Federation had said it would send its best and brightest. In Q's opinion, they were either lying or their best and brightest were utterly pathetic. Only a very few people could understand most of everything he tried to convey without a dog and pony show for explanation. Most of the scientists who came to him needed to have things explained, and explained again, and explained in different terms, and still they didn't get it, until Q wanted to drop-kick them into the nearest black hole. Discussions of history and anthropology were somewhat better; if he remembered an alien culture well enough to discuss it, he was usually able to explain it in terms the historians could understand without too much difficulty. But physics was a nightmare.

There were a few bright spots. On the rare occasions when the scientists sent to him could follow him without difficulty, discussing physics, or anything, was intensely pleasurable. He enjoyed being the center of attention, and he enjoyed stimulating conversations. Perversely, that made it so much worse when he had to teach stupid people-- perhaps if he'd never known teaching could be enjoyable, it wouldn't have been so unbearable when it wasn't.

Other problems plagued him. He had never gotten used to sleeping, or to dreams. Constant nightmares made him an insomniac, terrified by sleep, and so he needed to take sedatives almost every night. And then there were the perpetual tiny aches and pains that apparently came with being human; he'd almost forgotten what it felt like not to hurt. At first, he consumed painkillers as if they were candy; when he started needing higher and higher dosages, though, Dr. Li had restricted his access to them. Fearing that Li would do the same with the sedatives, or that Anderson would use control of his drug supply to control him, he had started stockpiling sedatives in his quarters, which meant there were several nights when he had to go without, and either stay up all night or suffer his dreams. The lack of his Q senses had never stopped bothering him. There were times when he would look out at the stars and realize he would never see them in their true beauty again, never watch the dancing ions at the core of the nuclear bridal chamber in the stars' hearts, and he would come perilously close to weeping. He would never create anything again-- he had tried his hand at holosculpture and a few other creative arts, and destroyed his own creations in rage at how far they fell short of what he'd once been capable of.

The first year, he'd felt like he had a purpose. Following his warning about the coming Borg invasion, Starfleet took him up on his offer to help them prepare. He had worked feverishly in cooperation with Starfleet scientists and engineers, helping them design shields that might hold against the Borg, weapons that could damage the machine entities; had talked to Starfleet tacticians, telling them everything he knew about the enemy. Studying the Borg had been a minor hobby of his, as studying humanity itself had been; his knowledge of the cyborg race was extensive. He had been glued to his viewscreen with everyone else on the starbase as the battle reports from Wolf 359 came in. And when the Borg invasion had been driven back, the Borg themselves crippled and possibly destroyed forever, he had felt a tremendous sense of accomplishment. He had helped save his adopted species from destruction. Better still, they knew it. His role in the battle was acknowledged and thanked. For a while, even on Starbase 56, where familiarity had long ago bred contempt, people were genuinely grateful to him, and it showed.

Things had gone downhill after that. The emotional high of the successful fight against the Borg gave way to an emotional low, as his life seemed to lose purpose. That was when his teaching work started to become unbearable, when Starfleet seemed to inflict truly stupid people on him in droves. One night, as he prepared to take his sedative, the pointlessness of it all overwhelmed him, and he took the entire amount of sedative he'd stockpiled, planning to sleep forever.

He'd woken up in sickbay, having been found unconscious by Commodore Anderson and a security escort. For a while after that, everyone went out of their way to be kind to him. That helped. He enjoyed the attention and the solicitude-- it made him feel much better, enough better that he no longer wanted to die. But things got bad again before long. He had been placed on medical restriction, no longer permitted to replicate or stockpile any medical supplies in his quarters-- he had to go to sickbay every time he needed a painkiller or sedative, which got very tedious very fast. When a well-liked officer was killed protecting him against yet another alien with a grudge, the mood on the starbase turned ugly. Q began to fear that his protectors no longer wished to play that role, and might themselves kill him. Once again overcome by despair, Q took an antique ceramic mug that he kept in his quarters, smashed it, and slashed his wrists with the sharp edges.

Later he found out he'd done it wrong. Not only were the cuts too shallow, but he'd cut across his wrists, not along them, making it much easier for him to be saved. 24th century medical technology took away even the scars. This time he got no sympathy. People-- Commodore Eleanor Anderson and Dr. Brian Li in particular-- seemed to think he'd done it to get attention. Medellin had rescued him from the pits of despair only by pointing out to him that the Continuum still might take him back. That tiny hope had been all that kept him going for months afterward. And gradually, he lost even that.

Over time, Q sank into a terrible numbness, a soul-destroying ennui. The acute desperation of those two terrible nights faded, replaced by a lack of ability to feel much of anything at all. He made Anderson's life hell just to give himself something to do. He tormented the scientists who came to him because he wasn't allowed to refuse to see them-- like a prostitute with an unforgiving and greedy pimp, he had no choice about who used his services. His movements were restricted, ostensibly to keep him safe, and his quarters were stripped of sharp and breakable objects. For a while, they'd even put a monitor in, but he'd gone on a hunger strike until they took it out. He had done his best to hide his growing disgust with his life-- none of them had the power to help him, and he'd grown sick of their useless pity. And their incompetent attempts at counseling, like Medellin's suggestion of a vacation. As if a vacation could help. As if anything could help.

Q had planned and researched this, determined not to be saved from himself this time. He had searched for a loophole in the interdict on medical supplies or sharp objects, and found that he could still get recreational materials out of his replicator, such as art supplies. Back when he'd experimented with creative arts, he'd used a highly corrosive acid as an etching solution, and he remembered the danger warnings on the bottle. If there was a more poisonous substance available, he hadn't heard of it. He'd gotten the stuff a week ago, and had spent the time considering his decision, weighing the pain it would cause him against the pain of staying alive.

His mind was made up now.

__

All you folks out there in the gallery, it might be a good idea to get out your popcorn and peanuts and sit down to watch. No doubt you'll find this vastly entertaining.

"Cheers," he said, raised the bottle to his lips, and drank.

* * *

Medellin stopped by Anderson's office on her way to her own. Anderson glanced up. "Did you have your conversation with Mr. Sunshine?" she asked.

"Yes." Medellin sat down. "I think Sekal was right to be worried, Lea. He's pretty bad. I'd like your authorization to send him on vacation."

"On vacation." Anderson mulled it over. "Vacation where? And are you sure that'll help any, Nian?"

"I don't know if it'll help-- but he's not enjoying his work, he has no social life here--"

"That's hardly our fault," Anderson said, somewhat acerbically. "If he wanted a social life, he might consider being fractionally less of an asshole."

Medellin sighed. "No, it's not our fault, but we're not really the ones paying the price for it. Q is. It was stupid and shortsighted of him to antagonize everyone, but I'm not sure he understood how important it is to have good relations with one's co-workers... and now, of course, there's a snowball effect involved. It would take such a herculean effort for Q to change his image on the starbase now that I don't think he's capable of it, even if I convinced him that that's what he needs. No, I think he needs to get away for a few weeks. Do you realize that everyone on this base except for him has either taken leave or a vacation in the past three years?"

Anderson frowned. "I thought everyone was required to take leave at least once a year."

"Everyone in Starfleet is. Q's not Starfleet. All our other civilians have spent _some_ time off the base in the past three years-- he hasn't. I'd like to send him to Earth, Commodore-- there's no way some alien assassin is going to get through Earth's defenses. He should be as safe there as he is here."

"On the other hand, Earth's hardly a place we want alien assassins to be trying to get to. There's a reason we're out in the middle of nowhere, you know."

"Three weeks or so isn't really enough time for anyone to track him down. Especially if he goes incognito, we can prevent anyone from tracking him through mundane means. There are all these psionic aliens and beings that manage to find him by what might as well be magic to worry about still, but... for three weeks? Don't you think it's a justified risk? He's so miserable, Lea. We've got to do _something_."

"I'm not convinced Earth's the best place. And what about all the people I've got lined up with appointments to speak with him?"

"If he kills himself, they won't get to talk with him either."

Anderson nodded. "That's true. We'll just have to--"

The intercom interrupted her. "Ops to Commodore Anderson."

She sighed. "Hang on to that thought, Nian." She touched her combadge. "Anderson here."

"We've got a visitor-- a Dr. T'Laren off the _Ketaya_\-- here to see Q."

"She's not scheduled, is she?" If she was, there had been a phenomenal screw-up somewhere along the line, as Anderson hadn't been notified of the appointment. She had given Q the next few days off on the assumption that he had no visitors scheduled.

"She's got a priority code from Starfleet."

Anderson's head was starting to throb. "Dock her and let her in to see me. I'll decide if her business warrants seeing Q without an appointment or not."

Medellin stood up. "Do you want me to go see if he's in any shape to take visitors?"

"Yes, good idea." Anderson pressed her hand to her head and massaged her throbbing temples as Medellin left. Sending Q on vacation was sounding like an awfully good idea, since it would give Anderson a vacation from Q. She'd have to consider whether or not it was too risky to send him to Earth, but certainly it seemed a gift from heaven to have him go _somewhere_ else. Anywhere that wasn't Starbase 56.

* * *

Medellin headed away from Anderson's office, toward the section of the base where Starfleet personnel, VIPs, and Q were quartered. Something was nagging at the back of her head, something she'd done, or hadn't done. She reviewed her conversation with Q earlier this morning. Was there something she'd left undone there? Something she hadn't said?

What if his condition was even worse than she'd guessed?

A sudden horrible premonition struck her. Medellin broke into a run, charging down the corridors. Though her ESP rating was minimal, barely above human average, though she'd never suffered a premonition before, she _knew_ that something terrible had happened.

She ran through the foyer to Q's suite, skidded to a halt in front of the door and touched the panel to open. The door remained shut-- locked. "Computer, open door. Medical override, Counselor Medellin!"

The door slid open. Medellin ran inside, through the living quarters of the suite, back into the bedroom. Q lay sprawled face-down on the floor of the bedroom, a half-empty bottle of colorless liquid lying near his hand, its contents spilled in a pool on the floor. It smelled strongly of acid. There were splashes of blood lying in and around the acid pool, fresh and bright red. Medellin ran to Q, hitting her combadge. "Medellin to transporter room, medical emergency! Transport Q and myself to sickbay immediately!"

A moment later there was no one in the room. The etching solvent continued to spill slowly onto the floor, eroding the rug.

* * *

Anderson stood to greet T'Laren as the visitor entered her office. As the name suggested, T'Laren was a female Vulcan, with the typical swarthy skin and dark eyes of that species. She was striking, interesting-looking, but far from beautiful. Her eyes were big and wide-set, her nose was a tad too long for human standards of beauty, and her chin was a bit on the strong side. She was tall, though not nearly as tall as Anderson, and her body was somewhat gawky and thin, dressed in a blue civilian shipsuit that emphasized her gawkiness. She appeared to be in her late twenties, which probably translated to late thirties or early forties for a Vulcan. What saved her from complete nondescript plainness was a pair of magnificent Vulcan cheekbones and a very un-Vulcan pile of curly black hair, cut in only the vaguest approximation of the typical Vulcan bowl cut. Anderson stared for a moment. She had met Vulcans with odd coloring, such as blonde or redhaired Vulcans, but she'd never met one without relentlessly straight hair. T'Laren's hair was short, but it was most definitely curly. Unruly wisps of it fell down, partially obscuring the points of her ears.

Anderson bowed slightly, the accepted form of greeting with Vulcans. "Dr. T'Laren. I confess this is something of a surprise-- I hadn't been notified you were coming."

"I hope it wasn't any inconvenience," T'Laren said. Anderson had to fight to keep a straight face. T'Laren spoke English with a Texas accent. Faint, but unmistakable.

__

Who is this woman?

"Not an inconvenience-- exactly," Anderson said. She gestured at a chair. "Sit down if you like."

T'Laren seated herself, and Anderson did likewise. "If it wasn't exactly an inconvenience, I have to assume it was something close to one, or you'd have said, 'No, not at all.' So in what sense is my visit presenting problems?"

"Well, your timing is bad. Q's been very depressed lately. The situation's been worsened by some recent bad news-- his first contact with humanity, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, recently passed away, and Q asked me for a few days off to mourn him. Or to do something. You have to understand, Doctor." What was she a doctor of, anyway? "Q is difficult enough to deal with when he's feeling well. I could order him to see you, but he's depressed enough to make your life and mine hell for it. Especially since I promised him a few days off."

"By all means, give him time off. I would like him to hear me out in a reasonable mood."

"You might have to wait a while. Q's very rarely in a reasonable mood."

"I know. I've studied his psychological profile in detail."

Anderson frowned. Few scientists who came to speak with Q bothered to look at his psych profile. Actually, few would even have access to it. "What exactly is your business with Q?" she asked.

T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "Starfleet didn't notify you, then. You not only weren't told I was coming-- you weren't told who I am."

"They didn't tell me a damn thing, Doctor. You're not on our schedule-- I don't even know what your specialty is."

"Xenopsychology, specializing in human."

Anderson stared at her blankly. "Then what do you want to talk to Q for? He knows less about human psychology, or anyone's psychology, than anyone you're ever likely to meet."

"Ah. You mistake my purpose here. I'm not here to see Q in the sense most of your visitors are, Commodore-- it would be more precise to say I'm here _for_ Q." T'Laren steepled her hands in front of her. "Starfleet Command's psychology division has grown somewhat concerned that we may lose him. I'm sure you're aware of what a valuable resource Q is for the Federation--"

"A day doesn't go by without him reminding me," Anderson said dryly. "Let me get this straight. You're a psychologist for humans, and you're here to counsel Q?"

"I am a xenopsychologist. My specialty is humans, but I'm acquainted with the psychology of numerous species. And I'm not precisely here to counsel Q. I'm here to take him with me."

"Mind telling me why?"

"Not at all. It is the opinion of Starfleet Command-- and having studied your Counselor Medellin's reports, I concur-- that Starbase 56 is doing an admirable job of protecting Q from physical dangers, but is itself an unhealthy environment for his psyche. It's obvious that you dislike him, from the little you've said in our conversation so far."

"Everyone dislikes him, Doctor-- he's not a likable person. He goes out of his way to make people's lives hell. He's obnoxious, insubordinate, amoral, and unbelievably selfish. If he has a good point, I can't think of it offhand."

"And is this opinion shared by others on your starbase?"

Anderson sighed. "Counselor Medellin is a bit more forgiving than I am. Commander Sekal is a Vulcan and can put up with him. Other than that-- yes, I'd have to say everyone shares that opinion. Dr. T'Laren, you don't know him. You haven't seen what he can do."

"I've studied his psych profile-- which concurs with you. He has no social skills. Unfortunately for him, he comes from a social species and has been adopted into one. He has as much need for social contact as any human-- he simply has no idea how to get it."

"And taking him off the starbase is supposed to give it to him?"

"He's not only suffering a lack of friends, Commodore. He's suffering a loss of freedom as well. We're discussing an entity who at one point had complete freedom of the universe. We have confined a being who is accustomed to traveling between galaxies to a single starbase, and expect him to adjust to it."

T'Laren had said nothing in an accusatory tone; everything was even and matter-of-fact. In the case of Vulcans, however, it was usually more what they said than how they said it, and Anderson was detecting a lot of accusatory implications. Defensively she said, "It was his choice! He agreed to come here for protection-- he couldn't survive away from the base's defenses!"

"I'm not accusing you of anything, Commodore Anderson." T'Laren looked startled that someone would make that inference. "You've done the best you could in a very trying situation. But I believe that right now, the greatest danger to Q is himself. I believe that the environment on Starbase 56 is causing or at least exacerbating his depression, and I believe that I can't hope to treat the condition until he's been removed from the situation. I--"

Medellin's voice over the com interrupted T'Laren. "Commodore, this is Nian. We've got an emergency in sickbay with Q."

Anderson was on her feet. "He tried to kill himself again?"

Medellin's voice was grim. "He might have succeeded this time."

"On my way."

T'Laren stood also. "I'd like to come as well, Commodore."

"Right." Anderson had no intention of standing around and arguing. If the woman was supposed to be Q's new psychiatrist, she might as well see what she was up against. "Come on."

* * *

Sickbay was in chaos. Dr. Li and a sizable portion of his medical staff were clustered around one bed, presumably Q's-- even as tall as Anderson was, she couldn't see over the mass of heads and bodies surrounding the bed. Medellin was by the door, hands clasped together in front of her. "It's my fault, Commodore," she said, voice wretched with guilt. "I should have had him on a suicide watch immediately. I missed the signs completely."

"We'll assign blame later, Counselor. I want to know what happened."

"I had a premonition that something bad had happened to him-- maybe I sensed my mistake earlier. I ran all the way to his room. When I got there, I found him on the floor. He'd drunk half a bottle of acid etching solution." Her recitation was calm, focused, at odds with her miserable expression. "He couldn't have done it more than thirty seconds before I got there. If I'd been a fraction faster, I could have gotten to him before he had a chance to drink."

"It was suicide, though. Not another mistake." In Q's first few months at Starbase 56, he had turned up at sickbay more than once with a case of gastric upset from eating something he hadn't known not to eat-- though none of his mistakes had been of this magnitude.

Medellin shook her head. "It was most definitely suicide. Q hasn't made mistakes like that in years. Besides, he had to have gone out of his way to get that bottle. He hasn't done anything like etching in two years."

"All right." Anderson tapped her combadge. "Anderson to Engineering."

The chief engineer answered. "Goetz here, Commodore."

"Get someone to find out for me when and where Q got hold of a bottle of etching solution."

"Yes, sir."

T'Laren asked, "Are you accustomed to having premonitions, Counselor?"

"Not at all." Medellin flushed slightly. "I guess it wasn't logical-- I've got no esper rating worth speaking of. But I was just overwhelmingly _sure_\--"

"I would hardly call it illogical, since you proved to be right. Few Vulcans acknowledge the value of intuition, Counselor, but I've found one can't be more than a mediocre therapist without it. Undoubtedly you subconsciously realized the strength of his suicidal tendencies."

"Maybe that was it," Medellin agreed, without sounding very convinced.

"Never mind how you found him," Anderson said. "The question I'm worried about is if you found him in time. What's Li say his chances are?"

Medellin shook her head, the miserable expression creeping across it again. "I don't know. They haven't had time to brief me yet."

"Right." Anderson looked over at Li, trying to see his face. She recognized that look of grim desperation. Q's chances for survival were just barely this side of impossible, if Li's face was to be believed-- and Anderson would have staked more than her own life on her ability to read the people under her command, and on Li's diagnostic skills. "Let's wait out here. Dr. T'Laren, assuming he _does_ pull through, what was this plan of yours again?"

"I plan to take him with me. _Ketaya_ is a small prototype vessel with the capacity for extremely high speed; it's not heavily armed, but it's capable of running away from almost anything. We could outrun a Galaxy-class starship as if it were standing still. Q would be almost as safe from external threats aboard _Ketaya_ as he is here. He would also be out of the atmosphere of Starbase 56, which I think is essential as a first step."

"You want to take him on vacation." Medellin managed to produce a tiny smile. "I was just recommending that to him and to Commodore Anderson."

"Not vacation, precisely. I think it would be bad for him to have no work to do."

"But he hates his work."

"More precisely, he hates the sort of people he's been seeing lately in his work. From your own reports, Counselor, it seems obvious that he would take considerably more pleasure in it if he could choose who he saw. There are several places I had thought to take him, if he wished it-- the wormhole near Bajor, the singularity near the Abister system, the annual archaeological conference on Chatimore. An opportunity to see the wonders of the galaxy once again, to travel freely and provide his knowledge to beings of his own choosing..."

"You do realize what you're setting yourself up for, though, don't you, Doctor?" Anderson leaned forward slightly. "Even Vulcans aren't immune to him. He just has to work harder to annoy them. I can promise you, though, he'll do it. I've never seen anyone so dedicated to making other people's lives miserable."

"Has it occurred to you that a large part of that is because he is so miserable himself?"

Anderson shook her head. "Have you read the _Enterprise_ reports on him? He's spent millions of years making people miserable. It's got nothing to do with his own state of mind. He just enjoys it."

"I will draw my own conclusions," T'Laren said, with a slight tilt of the head that might have been a Vulcan shrug. "I can assure you that he cannot offend me unless I choose to be offended. I am sufficiently empathic to understand his pain and sufficiently Vulcan not to be vulnerable to his personality. My hope is to teach him how to behave as a social being, so this sort of thing doesn't happen again."

Anderson's combadge bleeped. "Goetz to Commodore Anderson. We've found where he got the etching solution from."

"Go ahead."

"Personal replicator. It's not properly cross-listed; the computer lists it under recreational art supplies, not dangerous chemicals. He just asked for it. About a week ago."

"Damn." Anderson's fair skin darkened with anger. That was a tremendous oversight on someone's part. Until they had the system suicide-proofed, they couldn't let Q anywhere near a replicator. "We're going to have to restrict him from using the replicators at all except under supervision."

T'Laren frowned slightly. "That wouldn't be wise. Commodore, the problem is that Q is suicidal. Putting him on a suicide watch and protecting him from dangerous objects can only go so far. Sooner or later, he will end his own life, unless we treat the cause and not the symptom."

"Assuming he lives at all. We're all assuming he'll pull through this." Anderson glanced up as a nurse approached. "Did Li send you to report?"

"Yes, Commodore." The nurse was a young man, probably fresh out of the Academy. He looked bone-weary. "The chances aren't very good, I'm afraid. Dr. Li's trying to stabilize his condition long enough for us to replace the damaged organs, but... Q managed to take out most of his intestinal tract with that stuff, and he's badly damaged his windpipe and hurt his lungs. Even if we get all the relevant organs cloned and transplanted in time, the shock might still kill him. Dr. Li said to tell you that frankly, it'll be a miracle if he pulls through."

"Damn," Anderson whispered. Despite Medellin's eagerness to accept blame, she felt personally responsible. Q was a person under her command, dammit. He had come here for protection, and she'd failed him.

Medellin bit her lip. "Commodore, I hereby offer my resignation as base counselor. I've failed in my duty."

"Don't be stupid, Nian. This is my fault as much as it is yours. Sekal warned me last night, and I didn't suggest you talk to him until this morning."

"I would not give up hope," T'Laren said suddenly. "Considering who we're dealing with... I wouldn't consider a miracle to be an impossibility."

She stood up. "I will return to my ship, if that's acceptable, Commodore," she said. "I'd like to be notified if there's any change in Q's condition."

"That's fine." Anderson stood as well. "If Q does survive, Doctor, I'm willing to implement your proposal. You can't possibly do a worse job than we have."

* * *

Back aboard _Ketaya_, T'Laren first checked her ship's status. Maintenance procedures were going smoothly, no cause for alarm. She looked up at the ceiling and spoke to emptiness.

"You would hardly have invested this much in preparing me if I were only to arrive too late," she said. "Am I to assume that a miracle will take place on schedule?"

__

You take a lot for granted

, a voice in her head said.

_What makes you think we're planning to intervene? Maybe we'll just let events take their course._

"I know you, Lhoviri," T'Laren said sharply. "It might not have cost you much effort to save me, not in your terms, but it cost effort nonetheless. You wouldn't have done it if you didn't plan to use me. And as I have not been placed in a position to counsel the dead..."

"Touché." Lhoviri materialized in a burst of light, appearing as a ruddy-faced, blond human male leaning insouciantly against the back wall of _Ketaya_'s bridge. "Let's put it this way. There won't be any _obvious_ miracles. He's going to feel like hell for quite a while-- as well he should. That was a stupid stunt if ever he pulled a stupid stunt."

"Did you give a premonition to Counselor Medellin, or was that her native ability?"

Lhoviri grinned. "Hey, I can't tell you _all_ our secrets. You figure it out."

"Did you know he would do this before I could talk to him?"

"It was a possibility," Lhoviri agreed. "There were other possibilities as well that we took into account, but we definitely considered this one pretty plausible. Interesting suicide method he chose-- fits in with his flair for melodrama, but I wouldn't have thought he'd be able to face that much pain. Do you have any idea how much it hurts to drink liquid corrosive?"

"Having never done so, I cannot say I do."

"No. You picked a pretty melodramatic method yourself, mind you, but this one's positively grotesque." Lhoviri pushed off from the wall and wandered over to the console. "Looks pretty good. I suspect you'll be able to talk to him in three or four days. He won't be able to talk back too well, not after he destroyed his throat, but then there's millions of beings that would consider that an ideal situation for dealing with him." He flashed another grin at T'Laren. "So. Holding up pretty well under the pressure? Your little talk with Surak still helping?"

"Immensely. Thank you."

"Maybe you'd like to give me a more appropriate name?"

T'Laren looked at him, and deliberately smiled. "I find Lhoviri to be a thoroughly appropriate name for you," she said.

"You still don't trust me."

"I never will. I will serve you until I die, to the best of my ability. But I never will trust you, Lhoviri. The power inequity between us is too great. If I trusted you, I would have to worship you, and you are not the aspect of the All I would choose to honor."

"I like a woman who knows who her gods are," Lhoviri said. "You're right-- you shouldn't trust me. I'm about as ruthless a creature as you're likely to meet, and your welfare isn't my top priority. But then, you knew that. And it's not as if you've gotten no benefits from me."

"No," T'Laren said softly. "I didn't say I hadn't. I owe you an incalculable amount."

"You owe me your life," Lhoviri said. "Don't forget it."

"I owe you my sanity," T'Laren said, "and that is a far greater debt. Don't worry, Lhoviri. I will do what you expect of me, as well as I can."

"Hey. That's all I can ask. You're only mortal, after all."

He vanished in another burst of light. T'Laren headed for her quarters aboard _Ketaya_. There would be some waiting to do.

* * *

The dividing line between oblivion and self-awareness was the awareness of pain. It wasn't a great hurt; a tiny twinge, indefinitely located. But before, there had been no sensation at all. He had been blissfully unaware of his own lack of awareness. Now there was both pain and the knowledge of that pain.

He fought to regain oblivion, an action too inherently contradictory to succeed. There was no way to banish the hurt if it would not go away by itself. Thinking about it only made it grow greater. His mind constructed dreams to explain the pain, tormented recursive structures of nonsense. In the dreams, he was tortured by the inescapable conclusion the pangs brought: he was not dead. There were many forms of death, but none of them involved pain. So he was not dead. He had failed.

Before long, the dreams themselves became a torment, and he started to struggle against them, to fight his way to wakefulness. If he couldn't be dead, he would rather be awake. It was difficult; he kept dreaming that he _was_ awake, and each attempt to force himself to wakefulness seemed to bring him into another level of the dream. Gradually, however, he became distantly aware of voices outside the dream, voices outside himself.

"He's coming around, doctor. Should I increase sedative levels?"

"No. He'll heal faster if we're not depressing his system with sedatives. Stand by with 10 cc's of allocaine."

Suddenly the pain hit full force. It was like a savage animal tearing at his insides, ripping open his lungs, his throat, his belly. Q's eyes snapped open as sudden agony brought him to full consciousness. He gasped, bringing more suffering down on himself. His lungs were on fire and there was a wild animal chewing on the inside of his stomach, and every whimper he made worsened the sensations.

"I was afraid of this. Give him the allocaine."

A hypo pressed against the side of his neck. Almost instantly the pain started to subside. Being able to breathe without agony was almost a pleasure in itself. His vision cleared, and he registered the presence of two people by his bed: a young blonde woman with a hypo in her hand and ensign's pips, and a slim, scowling Asian man with graying hair. The man was Brian Li, Chief Medical Officer of Starbase 56; presumably the woman was a random nurse.

"Don't try to talk," Li said.

Q opened his mouth to ask "why not?" Before he could fully form the "why" part, he found out why not-- the pain returned, clawing at the inside of his throat. Instinctively he tried to put his hands to his throat, but his arms felt like leaden weights and wouldn't move properly. This time, at least, the pain faded rapidly.

Li sighed. "I tried to warn you," he said. "Maybe you'll listen to me this time. You're lucky to be alive. If Counselor Medellin hadn't gotten to you so soon, there'd have been no way we could save you. As it is, you managed to destroy your throat and most of your respiratory and alimentary systems. We've implanted cloned replacement tissue, but until it all heals together the nerves are going to be very touchy. Now we can give you medication for the chronic pain, so you can breathe normally without hurting. But if you try to talk you're going to be in agony. As I think you just found out." He shook his head. "This habit of doing whatever people tell you not to do is going to get you killed one of these days."

Q stared at Li in horror. He couldn't talk? For how long? How could he stay sane without being able to talk? He had chosen this particular method of suicide because he didn't think there was any chance of surviving it. If he _had_ thought there was the slightest chance that he would live, and be rendered mute, he would never have done it. He tried to lift his arm again, desperately needing to know how long he was going to be like this and racking his brain for some way he could express the question in hand signals. But the point was moot-- he was too weak to lift his arm anyway.

"How long?" he mouthed, careful not to actually speak.

Li paid no attention. He turned his back on Q and started walking away.

Violent, helpless frustration overwhelmed Q. Li was doing this deliberately. Even if Q mustered up the strength to call out, his voice would be too weak to carry, and Li still probably wouldn't hear him-- which was probably exactly what Li wanted. Li wanted to be able to ignore Q completely, to do the minimum required to save Q's life and no more.

Q raised his head slightly, trying to see his surroundings. He was, obviously, in sickbay, lying on a diagnostic bed with the diagnostic unit still lowered over his midsection. The unit extended from just below his armpits to just above his knees. He could feel nothing where it touched him; it was as if his body simply stopped where it began, and resumed where it left off. From his arms and the section of chest exposed, he could see that he was wearing some kind of pastel blue pajamas. They weren't a bad color. He nodded slightly, approving of them, and then smiled in self-mockery at his own vanity. _Obviously ugly pajamas would be a fate worse than death_, he thought, bitterly amused at himself.

Li returned with two nurses and a good bit of electronic equipment on an antigrav cart. "I want you to know," Li said without preamble, "that I disapproved of this. I don't think coddling you is a good idea at all. But Counselor Medellin was adamant that you have something to entertain yourself with, since you're going to be confined to bed for at least a week."

A week. Only a week. He could survive a week in bed. But a week in bed without being able to talk? Q watched with mingled fascination and frustration as the two nurses set up a computer terminal within easy sight range. How was he supposed to use a terminal if he couldn't talk?

Li lifted Q's right hand and put something underneath it-- a pad with a rolling sphere imbedded. "This is a tracball. It's used to control computers for patients who can't talk and can't type. You should be able to move your hand enough to use it-- it wasn't your hand you damaged. Try rolling the ball with your fingertips." Q did so. On the terminal's screen, a little pointer moved as he guided it. Now he recognized the technology. _Astonishing. Technology from the dawn of the computer age. How quaint. _

One of the nurses laid a smooth, skin-tight strip of what felt like tape across Q's throat. It itched slightly. "You can summon a nurse or me with the computer, or with a button on the left side of your bed," Li said. "And the device Nurse Wrigley's just put on your throat is a subvocalizer." Li placed a small flat box-like object on top of the computer, well out of Q's reach, and tapped it. "It'll pick up your subvocalizations, transmit them to the computer, and feed them out through this speaker, so you can talk in an emergency. Try it. Subvocalize something."

"Is it my own voice?" Q asked, and was gratified to hear that it was-- somewhat flat and lacking in affect, but his own voice nonetheless. It was mildly unnerving to hear it coming from a source some distance away from his head-- for three years, his voice had come exclusively from his throat, and he'd gotten used to the arrangement. It was also strange to hear his voice as it actually was heard to other humans, without the factor of bone conduction interfering, for the first time in three years. The subvocalization itself brought a tiny twinge of pain-- bearable, for the sake of being able to talk, though. "Wonderful. I thought I was going to have to go through the next several days completely mute."

"You are," Li said, and tapped the speaker, turning it off. Once more deprived of speech, Q could only stare in disbelief and fury. "This is for emergencies only. You could still damage your throat using it on a regular basis, and I don't trust you not to abuse it. The speaker stays off unless it's vitally necessary."

As Li turned away, Q tried to sit up, to reach the speaker. He hadn't anywhere near the strength, and besides, the diagnostic bed would have gotten in his way. Immediately he reached over and pressed a button to summon a nurse.

Li himself turned around and flicked on the speaker. "What is it?"

"I want the speaker left on," Q demanded.

"Too bad." Li flicked the speaker off again. "I'm not coddling you, Q. I'm tired of seeing you in here for suicide attempts. Maybe next time you decide to kill yourself, you'll remember how unpleasant it was recuperating and rethink your decision."

__

And maybe next time I'll just make sure no one rescues me until it's too late

, Q thought. Li turned and walked off again.

Morosely Q turned his attention to the computer. Annoyingly cute little icons sat on the screen, describing the various functions and programs he could access. He flipped through the library, decided there wasn't anything he wanted to read, and then hit on an idea. The music library was accessible from here as well. He routed the speaker pathway to the main computer speakers throughout sickbay, called up _Also Sprach Zarathustra_ from the music library, upped the max decibel level to close to the limits and lay back, smirking. The first three bars were relatively quiet. Across the room he saw Li turn his head, with a "what the hell?" expression on his face. Then the first crashing chord hit, at a sound level that was almost painful. The entire medical staff jumped, shrieked, or staggered.

"Computer!" Li screamed. "Turn off that noise!"

The music shut off. Li stormed over to Q, who grinned insolently. _No appreciation for the classics. Shame, shame, Doctor._ "What did you think you were doing?" Li snarled. "There are sick people in here!"

Q jerked his head toward the speaker. Li shook his head. "Oh, no," he said. "I'm not falling for it. I don't care what your explanation is." He took the tracball and jerked it out from under Q's hand, setting it on top of the terminal next to the speaker. "Your computer access is revoked until you can behave like a civilized being."

It hadn't occurred to Q that Li would do a thing like this. Without computer access, he was doomed to crashing boredom, and when he was bored it was far too easy to think about how depressed he was. He couldn't even protest. For a fleeting spiteful second he thought of talking anyway, forcing his voice to work despite the pain, and hopefully ruining as much of Li's work as he could. But it was immediately obvious that it would hurt him far more than Li, and while Q was perfectly capable of cutting off his nose to spite his face, he was also very bad at dealing with extreme pain. His protest would fall on deaf ears anyway.

As Li left again, he stared at the computer in despair. Without the hand-held device, it was simply a boring screen with icons on it, hardly more than a few seconds of visual stimulation. He pressed the button for the nurse. No one came, so he pressed it several more times, and finally leaned on it for half a minute before a nurse finally came over to him. She flicked on the speaker. "Yes?"

"I'm hungry, I'm bored and I want my computer back. I promise to be good."

"You're not hungry-- the diagnostic unit is feeding you intravenously. I'm sure you are bored, but there's nothing I can do about that. Dr. Li says you're not to get the computer control back until tomorrow morning." She switched off the speaker before he could say anything else. He pressed the call button. Exasperated, she put the speaker back on. "What _now?_"

"I want to see Commodore Anderson."

"The Commodore's asleep."

"Asleep? What time is it?"

"It's late."

"Then I want a sedative."

"You've been under sedation for three days. Dr. Li doesn't want you given any more for at least another day."

"But my throat hurts."

"That's because you're talking." She switched off his speaker again. "_Now_ your throat won't hurt."

Q pressed the call button again. The nurse reached down, pulled a restraint out of the bed, and pushed his left hand into it, so he couldn't reach the call button. "You've just cried wolf once too often," she said firmly. "In an hour, I'll take you out of that restraint. You'd better not have a genuine emergency before then, because come hell or high water I'm not answering that call button, not even if you manage to wriggle free and use it. The diagnostic unit ought to take care of any biological needs, so there's no reason you should need me for an hour or so. Maybe you might want to think about the cost of abusing your privileges."

In disbelief, Q watched her go. These were medical personnel? How could they call themselves healers, when they abused their patients like this? He tried to move his trapped hand, but in his weakened condition he had no hope of escaping the restraint, not that he'd have much hope even in good condition. He still had one hand free, but there wasn't anything he could do with it-- he was too weak to move it much, and there was nowhere to move it to. He couldn't sit up, turn over or even lift his head much, there was nothing to look at and nothing to do-- he couldn't even sleep, for fear of the nightmares' return. And weak as he was, he wasn't particularly sleepy anyway.

It was going to be a very long night.

* * *

Early in the morning Anderson came to see him. He had been half-asleep, drifting, fighting to avoid both the boredom of full wakefulness and the nightmares attendant on full sleep. It had been less than successful; he had suffered from strange and disturbing dreams all night. The footsteps near his bed alerted him that someone was there, someone who might well give him back his computer or his voice. He opened his eyes, and saw Anderson towering over his bed. With the light at her back brightening her short fair hair and transforming it into a halo, she looked oddly like a mourning angel, her face somber as she looked down at him.

She shook her head slowly. "I came down here with every intention of chewing you out for this stunt," she said quietly. "But it occurs to me that if you're desperate enough that you needed to do this, nothing I could say would make much of a difference."

__

It would make a great deal of difference if you turned on my speaker

, Q thought at her. Anderson, neither telepathic, empathic nor overly sensitive in the mundane sense, made no move toward the speaker. "I'm sorry it got this bad," she said. "God knows you're not my favorite person, but you don't deserve... this." She gestured, taking in the bed, the diagnostic unit, the entire situation. "I can't even imagine the kind of pressure that makes drinking acid seem like a good idea."

Q stared up at her sullenly. He didn't want her sympathy. He wanted his voice back. _Can you imagine what it's like to be mute, Eleanor?_

"In any case. There's someone to see you, a Vulcan named T'Laren. Obviously I'm in no position to force you to talk to her, but I would appreciate it. I'm going to talk to Dr. Li, and get him to agree to turn your voicebox back on so you can talk to Dr. T'Laren, if you choose. You can move your head for yes or no."

In order to get his voice back, Q would have talked to anyone. He nodded vigorously. Anderson smiled slightly. "Thanks," she said. "I don't think you'll regret it."

She turned and left. Q watched her go for a few moments, and then resumed staring at the ceiling, feeling furious and resentful. Thus they sucked him back into their web. As badly as he wanted to die, as little as he cared about anything anymore, he still feared boredom and helplessness, and like any human, he could be controlled with what he feared. He hated that about himself. He had tried, time after time, to muster up the courage to tell Anderson to go to hell and take her damned scientists with her. In fact, he _had_ told her so, several times. But he could never stick to his guns. In the end, he always gave in. Even now, when he lay apathetic and near death in a sickbay bed, Anderson could make demands of him, and he had to give in.

Well, he'd make this T'Laren pay for it. If she was enough of a vulture that she would come interrogate a man on his deathbed, she deserved the worst he could do. She was a Vulcan, so it would take some work to find her weak points-- but even Vulcans had them, and when you put the right kind of pressure on Vulcans' weak points they cracked completely. He would test her limits, see quite how controlled she really was. Q smiled, a thin, vicious expression. He hadn't spent thousands of years testing people for nothing.

A slight commotion drew his attention. Painfully he lifted his head enough to look over at the other end of sickbay. Anderson, Li, and a slender, curly-haired woman were making their way over toward him, arguing. The woman looked short next to Anderson, but then so did everyone except Q himself; she was actually about Li's height. Li was talking.

"...solution is not to coddle him," he was saying. "He doesn't _need_ to be able to talk yet, and he's risking permanent damage to his vocal cords."

"Doctor." It was the curly-haired woman. "Permanent damage to his vocal cords is something of an irrelevant fear if he kills himself in the next month. And in what sense is this 'coddling' him?"

"I mean you're coddling him. Your insistence on giving him the computer interface back, even though he's abused it; you want him free to talk for half an hour or more, despite the damage it might cause... This is a man who has put himself in sickbay for self-inflicted injuries three times so far. I don't see any good coming of making sure he's entertained while he's here, at the expense of his health and the well-being of other patients!"

"Do you honestly believe that Q will refrain from attempting his own life again simply because sickbay bores him?" the woman asked. Q studied her with interest, trying to place her accent. She wasn't wearing a Starfleet uniform, and her voice was precise enough, her coloring swarthy enough, that she could be the Vulcan he'd been told to expect-- except that she had curly hair and a Texas accent. He couldn't see the ears under the hair. "Perhaps you believe that he's merely trying to get attention?"

"Well, it's worked every time, hasn't it?" Li said sharply. "Every time he tries to kill himself, he comes here, gets fussed over and babied-- that's certainly incentive."

Q fumed at the blatant untruth in that statement. The last time he'd ended up here, the last thing he'd gotten was sympathy. He wished desperately for a voice to protest the unfairness. In the next moment, the woman voiced his protest for him, saying, "Do you truly believe that he would have drunk a bottle of etching solution to _get attention?_ When his survival depended on such an improbable chain of circumstance that it's frankly unbelievable he lived? When a person attempts suicide as a cry for help, they _don't_ drink acid."

"No. They cut their wrists or overdose on pills."

"Q's previous suicide attempts have no bearing on this one. Are you this insensitive to all your patients, Doctor? Or is it just that you despise Q so much, you can't see the truth?"

Q's eyes widened. Whoever she was, she was good. If she _was_ T'Laren, she'd just earned a conversation on whatever topic she wanted. Probably she was only defending him for the sake of his intellectual value, but he appreciated it nonetheless-- and appreciated the skill and viciousness of her defense as well. He lived for challenging verbal combats. This woman could be a worthy opponent.

Anderson shook her head. "That was uncalled-for, T'Laren."

"I'm sorry if I sound cruel, but I think Dr. Li is failing to understand. Q is desperately, mortally ill. His illness is psychological, not physical, but it's no less dangerous than Phaedian viral leukemia or Mistarin blood fever. You have taken a man dying of ennui and despair, locked him away from all human contact for the sake of protecting his voice, and deprived him of anything to take his mind out of its destructive inward focus. If a man with a broken leg lies in the path of a moving vehicle, it may well damage his leg to crawl out of range, but what would that matter if the vehicle crushed him? I want to be absolutely certain that Dr. Li is truly acting out of the best interests of his patient, in refusing me permission to speak to Q, and not subconsciously acting on his dislike for Q."

"For a Vulcan, you play dirty pool, Doctor," Li said angrily. "Actually, that's dirty pool for a human. Or anyone."

"If my words hurt you, I apologize. But consider that words rarely cause pain if there's no grain of truth to them."

"Fine. You can talk to Q. What concern is it of mine if he destroys his voice permanently? I'm just his doctor." Li took a deep breath. "Keep it under half an hour a day if you can. He can't be trusted with his own well-being-- he lives in the present, no concern for future consequences at all. And if you think there's any hope at all of him surviving the next few years, I would like to suggest that he might want to use the nerves in his throat sometime in the future, and that _you_ are responsible for making sure he doesn't permanently damage them now." He stalked off. Q grinned.

Anderson looked over at Q, and back at T'Laren. "Did you need to do that in front of him?" she asked quietly, jerking a thumb at Q.

"Dr. Li will understand, once he's had some time to calm down," T'Laren said. "He would be considerably more vitriolic in defense of a patient, were the situation reversed. I truly didn't intend to hurt him... but Q's well-being takes precedence over his hurt feelings. I can try to smooth it over with him later..."

"That ought to be fine. He doesn't hold grudges," Anderson said. "Which is probably why he doesn't have the ulcers I do. I _do_ hold grudges, Doctor. I understand your reasoning here... but don't pull a stunt like this with me, understand?"

"I have no intention of doing so, Commodore. You wouldn't respond to such tactics, and they aren't necessary with you."

"Good. In that case, I'll leave you to it." Anderson left.

T'Laren approached the bed, tapping the speaker to turn it on. Up close, Q could see the ears. "Oh, very good," he said, as soon as the speaker was on. "Consider yourself applauded. I'm impressed."

"I'm glad you think so."

"I was prepared to tear you apart for being such an incredible vulture. But after a performance like that... you've earned whatever information you want. Ask, and ye shall receive. I just want to ask _you_ something first."

"Go ahead."

"What is a Vulcan doing with a Texas accent?"

"I grew up on Earth. Mostly in Texas, to be exact."

"Really. Ever consider changing your name to T'Ex?"

T'Laren let a beat pass, studying him. Finally she said, "I'd been informed you have a remarkable wit. I must assume it's your injury responsible for that one, then, or else I've been misinformed."

She _was_ good. "What would a Vulcan know about wit?"

"Apparently more than a million-year-old entity knows of tact."

Q shrugged weakly. "If one would be a vulture, one cannot complain about the smell of the carrion."

T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "Vulture?"

"A carrion-eating bird, on Earth--"

"I know what a vulture is. I was wondering what bearing the analogy has on me. You've called me a vulture twice, and I'm not sure I understand your reasoning."

"You must not be all that bright, then. I'd think it would be obvious. You needed whatever scientific or historical information or whatever you came for _now?_ You couldn't wait until I was off my deathbed?"

"A deathbed's where you go to die, not where you recuperate from dying. And _you_ are missing the obvious."

"I suppose that being that I'll try it again when I get out, and so you need to get what you can out of me now? That's certainly logical, but then so's eating carrion."

"I'm not here to pry information out of a dying man, Q. I'm here to try to prevent you from dying. Anderson didn't tell you what I am?"

"She said you were a Vulcan. That much appears to be correct."

"I'm a psychologist. I'm here to help you."

Abruptly her attack on Li made a lot more sense. Q frowned. "Then why do they keep calling you Doctor and not Counselor?"

"Because I'm not Starfleet. Counselor's a Starfleet designation."

"How long was I unconscious?"

"Four days or so; why?"

"It seems like they sent you remarkably quickly."

"Remarkably indeed, considering that I got here the day you did it," T'Laren agreed. "It's been suspected for some time that you might do something like this. I was hired and sent here on the assumption that you were planning to kill yourself, though I certainly didn't expect you to try it a few minutes after I arrived."

"It was suspected by whom?"

"Starfleet's very worried about you, Q. Counselor Medellin's a good woman, a talented counselor, but she's become too personally involved to do much good."

Or in other words, she was incapable of counseling him properly because she despised him. "So they sent you, as a theoretically objective person." He frowned. "How good could a Vulcan psychiatrist possibly be? I wouldn't imagine you'd be much on empathy."

"Few Vulcans were raised on Earth. I understand humans better than I understand my own kind, sometimes. Besides, true mastery of emotions isn't possible without thoroughly understanding them; don't let any Vulcan tell you differently. My field is actually xenopsychology; I've specialized in human, but I've treated Betazoids, Andorians, Thurali, I have experience with Romulan culture, I've met numerous aliens, including one or two near-omnipotent entities... I think it's a reasonably good bet that I can figure you out."

"Why'd Starfleet send a civilian psychologist?"

"I used to be Starfleet. In addition, there are certain obvious advantages to using a Vulcan for this."

"What? That whole nonsense about you being too logical to take offense? I assure you, Vulcans are some of the easiest races to provoke in the entire galaxy. All you need to do is imply that they have emotions, and they'll furiously deny it. Which is something of a self-defeating proposition, don't you think?"

"Certainly. But why is it so important to you to be able to provoke people?"

Q shrugged again. "I'm obnoxious and disliked, you know that's so."

"You're avoiding the question. Your obnoxiousness is a result of your desire to provoke, not the cause of it. Why do you consider provoking people a priority?"

"It entertains me. And my life is so unutterably tedious, I need all the entertainment I can get. Truly unflappable people are truly boring."

"I'm surprised you find human existence so boring. I would think there'd be far more opportunity to become jaded as an immortal being who nothing can harm."

"Ah yes. I've read numerous stories about humans becoming immortal and growing bored with their lives. I think it's something you mortals desperately want to believe, to justify your deaths. But the sad fact is, mortality is much more tedious. And when it's not tedious, it's downright unpleasant. There was so much more to see when I was omnipotent, so much more to do..."

"Wouldn't omniscience entail boredom?"

"Omniscience is not an exact term. In the case of the Q, it's more that we can find anything out if we want to. Even then, study and personal involvement can amplify what we learn-- rather like the difference between reading a summary of a book and reading the book oneself. It's a big universe. I could have gone for millions more years simply in this matter-based universe without growing bored."

"There are things to do and see and learn as a mortal as well. You simply haven't done any of them. For three years you've stayed on a single starbase, traveling nowhere, experiencing very little of what mortal life has to offer. One would almost think you deliberately resist trying anything that might make you happy."

"Why would I do that? Not only is it counter-productive, it's hardly necessary. Nothing _could_ make me happy."

"Why not?"

Now she was beginning to sound like Medellin. Medellin with a harder, colder edge to her voice and a faint Texas accent. "You mortals persist in believing that I've lost something extra. Some addition, that I can easily do without. After all, you think, you've lived all your lives without being omnipotent, so why can't I? It isn't like that. My senses once covered the entire electromagnetic spectrum, the psionic bandwidths, the macroscopic and microscopic scales, gravitons, quanta, time itself-- at least the past-- the infinite resources of the universe, and now? I am limited to five very narrow senses, only one of which I can shut off at will. I feel pain, when I never did before. I can _feel_ my physical body decaying around me. I can operate on the world around me only with two very blunt instruments, where before I had only to think a thing and it was done. Can you understand? Mortality is normal for you. It's crippling for me. There is no equivalent analogy. A human can't lose as much as I have even by dying. A human in a persistent vegetative state is closer to what he used to be than I am. And you ask me why I'm unhappy? How could I be expected to be happy?"

"And so you've decided to end this unhappiness by killing yourself."

"Exactly."

T'Laren turned away, pacing. "Pathetic," she said.

Q's eyes narrowed. "'Pathetic?'"

"Your Continuum told you that if you helped them collect information on humanity by becoming human, they might eventually reinstate you. Am I correct?"

"They never meant that," Q snarled. "I haven't heard from them in three years. If they haven't given me any feedback in that long--"

"In _how_ long?" T'Laren asked sharply, turning back to face him. "Three years is nothing to the Q Continuum. You should know that far better than I. It shows how far your judgement is compromised by your depression that you would think such a thing. Eighty years would be nothing. They could wait an entire human lifetime and take you back on your deathbed."

"I can't live like this for eighty more years!"

"Yes. That is what's pathetic. Q, I am mortal. I long ago came to terms with the knowledge that I would die, like all mortals. I don't know if I would even want to be immortal. But if I wanted it, and I believed that suffering eighty years of pain would give me a good chance at becoming a goddess, or even an undying being-- and if the alternative was not a life of happiness, but an early, pointless death-- I would choose the pain. Almost any mortal would. Obviously you Q are not so advanced as you think you are, if bearing pain is so impossible for you that you can't hold on a mere eighty years."

The words struck a painful nerve. Q's eyes went hard and flinty, masking the pain. "Don't try to shame me into staying alive, T'Laren," he said. "I know I'm a coward. It's one of the reasons I'd rather be dead."

"So you do feel shame at your own weakness."

"I feel shame at all my weaknesses. But I know them, and they're immutable. I can't change who I am. And don't judge the entire Continuum on the basis of me. There's a reason they threw me out, you know."

"Do you know that your weaknesses are immutable? Have you tried to change them?"

"I've tried. I've tried so hard, you can't imagine what it costs to try to break the habits of several million years but I've tried. And this is as far as I've gotten. Besides, things are only going to get worse. Already I look like hell. I was reasonably good-looking when I first took this body, as humans go-- at least _I_ considered this form attractive, it's why I picked it. In three years, I've seen it begin to decay. I'm far too thin, I have lines on my face, I'm losing my hair. I ache constantly, and when I complain about it Li tells me to stop whining, all humans have little aches and pains. These don't feel little. If these are little aches and pains, I don't want to be around when the serious pain starts. All things considered, I'd just rather be dead."

"But it's hardly any wonder that your health is so poor, when you've abused it so," T'Laren said. "You eat like a child-- you live on chocolate, bread and pasta. If your nutritionist hadn't programmed the base replicators to automatically place dietary supplements in your meals, you'd have come down with a deficiency disease or two a year ago. You take a sedative to sleep almost every single night, and then consume seven or eight cups of caffeinated coffee in the course of the next day. You have resisted several offers to participate in some sort of physical exercise program. You have even resisted opportunities to learn self-defense, something that a man in your position should learn. In your time on Starbase 56 you've been stabbed, shot, poisoned, attacked by a swarm of stinging insects, beaten more than once, and then there are your two previous suicide attempts. Were it not for the miracles of modern medicine, you would be in far worse shape-- even a hundred years ago, you'd have come down with several illnesses by now. Your poor health is not the cause of your death wish, Q. I would rather say the converse is true."

Q shrugged. "I hate the demands this body makes on me. I've been engaged in a cold war with it for three years. Recently I escalated it into a hot war... but my body's got meddlers like Li and Medellin on its side. It still won."

"You can't win a war with your own body, Q."

"It's not my own body. It belongs to a man a century dead. I copied it without his permission; that doesn't make it mine."

T'Laren paused for a second, as if choosing her next tactic. "What was the reason for your two previous suicide attempts?"

Q laughed bitterly for a moment, until the pain hit. He had forgotten how much it hurt to laugh. For several seconds he lay gasping, trying to regain his equilibrium. The pain subsided, and he contented himself with a bitter smile. "Didn't you talk to Li? He can tell you all about it."

"He told me it was an attempt to get attention."

"Wasn't it?"

"You would know better than I. I'm inclined to believe that they were serious attempts, however, and you just didn't understand the mechanics of suicide well enough to do it efficiently."

"Really." She was the first person Q had met who had made that guess, and he wasn't sure how comfortable he was with that. There was a kind of safety in being perpetually misunderstood. "So if you know so much about it, why don't you tell me why I did it."

"Very well." She walked over to the bed and sat down beside it, gazing at him evenly as she spoke. "You are consumed by an overwhelming guilt and self-hatred. You hide this from those around you with great success, possibly even from yourself most of the time. Perhaps you manage to convince your conscious mind that the blame for what's happened to you all belongs to others. But inside you know that you brought this on yourself. You find this existence unbearable, and you believe that the Continuum would not have so punished you if it were not justified. Thus, you hate yourself for bringing yourself to this pass. You believe that you are fundamentally superior to all mortals, and experience nausea and revulsion at the demands of mortal life, frequently. But you see that mortals are much better than you are at interacting with other mortals, and you see it as a failing in you personally, not a flaw in the Q as a whole. You compare yourself to other Q, as well as to mortals, and find yourself wanting. You also want desperately to make social contact with mortals, since that's the only social contact possible to you now. But because you feel yourself superior to mortals, you refuse to 'lower' yourself to their level, and refuse to show your own emotional needs, or try to fill theirs. As a result, they hate you. You exacerbate the situation because negative attention is still attention, but it's a poisonous kind of attention and it only magnifies your own self-hate. You have been self-destructing since you became mortal. Possibly since before that, as it seems strange to me that such an ancient and knowledgeable entity as yourself would do something as foolish as anger the beings who provide his power, but I'm not qualified to talk about that. In any case, it seems obvious that you have been subconsciously self-destructive your entire mortal life, and that occasionally your death wish becomes powerful enough to break into your conscious mind, causing a suicide attempt."

Q stared at her in shock. What she said was nonsense. Complete arrant nonsense. He had no need to have mortal friends, his bad health was not the result of a desire to self-destruct, and he didn't hate himself. It was ridiculous to imagine. He didn't-- He--

He swallowed hard, against a sudden inexplicable desire to weep. Part of him recognized that description, resonated to it, and why did he feel as if part of him was surging to the surface, desperate to be recognized, when the whole thing was so ridiculous? It hurt to swallow. Dry-mouthed, he summoned as much sarcasm as he could and said, "And what if I told you you're totally wrong? That I did it for attention?"

"Then I'll give you another scenario," she said. "In the first place, it's belittling to say you did it for attention. Though the description may be accurate, the connotations of the statement are completely wrong. No one ever attempts suicide simply because they'd like a bigger share of the limelight. Some fundamental need in you was not being filled. You may have tried to express this need in some other fashion for a while before the attempt, but eventually it came to the point where the only way you could ask for what you needed was to risk your life. Obviously the need was desperate enough that you considered the risk justified. Just as obviously, no one listened. You called for help the only way you knew how, and when you were ignored twice, you despaired of ever getting what you needed. So you became genuinely suicidal, feeling your life unbearable with this need unfulfilled, and tried a much more drastic suicide method in hopes of seriously ending your life." She leaned forward. "Which scenario is it, Q? Or is it both?"

Q shook his head. "You paint very pretty word-pictures, T'Laren," he said. "I'd love to have you as my advocate anytime-- you could melt a stone's heart with stories like that. But that doesn't make them true."

"Perhaps you'd like to give me a different explanation, then?"

"Suppose your second scenario _were_ true. What is this putative lack I have that's strong enough to kill me?"

"On a guess, I'd say some kind of positive social contact. As much as you try to hide it, you have the same social needs any human does."

"That's ridiculous. You think I want to kill myself because no one likes me? I have a little bit more strength of will than _that_."

"We're not talking about your strength of will. I have no doubt that you could do anything you truly wanted to do. The need we're discussing affects what you want, not what you're able to do about what you want. The emotional climate on Starbase 56 is killing you by inches, Q. If you're to have any hope of recovering, you need to leave the starbase."

"It isn't the emotional climate here that's killing me! I could be surrounded by smiling happy people who positively adore me, and it wouldn't change anything! Mortality itself is killing me!"

"That's a tautology. Obviously mortality is killing you. Mortality kills all of us."

"That's not what I meant-- don't play word-games with _me_, woman, I've been doing it longer than your species has existed. I don't think the knowledge that I'll die is what's destroying me-- after all, obviously it's possible for the Q to die, or I couldn't be in this position, could I? I always knew I had the potential to be dead, and it never bothered me before. No, as I said before, I am crippled, deaf, blind, and retarded. I'm sure living among people who dislike me exacerbates the situation, but there's nothing I can do about that. No matter where I go, what I do, people will dislike me. And their dislike is not the root cause of my desire to be dead. The fact that I am incapable of doing any of the things I might want to do is killing me. My life is utterly pointless and I don't see it going anywhere but downhill. I just want oblivion."

T'Laren shook her head. "Except for one brief week aboard the _Enterprise_, you've spent your entire mortal life on Starbase 56. You have no objectivity. You can't say that you would be no happier off the base, since you have no basis for comparison. And the fact that you so resist the notion that leaving might help you indicates to me that you don't truly want to be happy. You want to wallow in your misery and die of it."

"How can you say that?" Q was furious. His throat ached fiercely, both from the amount of talking he'd done and from the effort it took to keep his speech subvocalized, not to shout at her. "I tried! I fought this for three years!"

"If you truly wanted help, you'd grasp at anything that might offer hope, however small."

"There speaks someone who's never been in my position. Do you know how much it hurts to hope, and struggle for something, and find out all your hopes are a fool's dream, a mirage that evaporates and leaves you with less than nothing?"

"Yes. I do."

"_How_ can you? You're a Vulcan! Intellectual understanding of an emotion isn't understanding at all!"

"I tried to kill myself two years ago."

That brought him up short. Q stared. A Vulcan, attempting suicide? "Why?"

"It isn't important, why... I hated myself, and I hated my life, and I was being devoured by guilt for certain acts I'd committed... and the only logical solution to my pain seemed to be death. I was offered rehabilitation, healing, constructive methods of handling my grief. I refused them. I hated myself, believed I deserved my suffering, and would not part with it." She was silent for a moment, staring down at her clasped hands.

"I don't hate myself, T'Laren. I hate this shell I'm trapped in. There's a difference."

"Perhaps I'm projecting myself onto you a bit," she said. "But there is no logical reason for you not to try something, anything. Even if you don't think it will work. After all, you can always kill yourself afterward, if the solution failed. If you kill yourself first, you're throwing away any hope that you could ever live and be happy."

"Humans aren't logical creatures."

"I'm well aware of that. But their illogic follows patterns. If you refuse to even try letting yourself be helped, there must be a powerful if illogical reason. And self-hate is the only reason I can think of that would be that strong."

Q sighed. "I can't leave Starbase 56. I made a deal with Starfleet; they'd never let me go. Besides, how would I survive? I've got enemies out there, you know. That's why I'm here."

"What I'm suggesting is that you come with me. _Ketaya_ is a small, prototype vessel; it's not so well-armed, but its shields are magnificent, and it can go faster than anything the Federation has. For that matter, faster than anything the Borg had. It's mostly automated; one person can run it, though for safety's sake it'd be best to have two. I'm the only crew it currently has. We could go anywhere you want; you won't have to deal with anyone besides me on a regular basis, and we can outrun anything that Starbase 56 could conceivably protect you against."

"That doesn't sound very safe."

"Why do you care? You want to die, don't you?"

Q frowned. Why _did_ he care? "It's different," he said. "If I kill myself, that's my decision. If I let someone else do it, that's also my decision. But if someone just comes in and kills me-- You know some of these aliens have absolutely horrible execution methods."

"Worse than swallowing acid?"

"Much worse. I admit that hurt quite a bit, but it was over very quickly. If it wasn't for Medellin and Li rescuing me, I'd hardly have suffered at all. I don't want pain, you understand. I'm not a masochist. I'm trying to _escape_ pain."

"Starbase 56 hasn't proven to be the safest of places, either," T'Laren said. "I've studied the files. How would something like-- say, the Maierlen assassin and his swarm of insects-- get aboard a starship with only two crew members? Our shields are proof against anyone's transporter technology. Besides, right now I think the far greater danger to you is yourself. If you could leave the base, get back out into the galaxy, go where you wanted, and if that proved to be what you need to want to live again, you would be in considerably less danger than you are here, despite the manpower and resources dedicating to protecting you."

By now his throat hurt an amazingly great deal, and he was beginning to feel exhausted. "Why would Anderson let you take me?" he asked. "Or is she trying to get rid of me?"

"She'd hardly try to get rid of you, Q. As annoying to her as you are personally, you as a commodity are the reason for Starbase 56's importance. Without you, this base is a nondescript backwater starbase, just like a hundred others, and the crew she's recruited won't stay in such a place. If you left permanently, most of the crew of 56 would transfer elsewhere. Anderson herself would probably leave. But she knows that the Federation won't get any more use out of you as you are now... and Commodore Anderson is basically a compassionate woman. For all the conflicts you two have had, she doesn't want to see you suffering like this. She's given me permission to take you, if you're willing, because she knows you can't stay here."

That covered all the holes in her argument he could think of. Undoubtedly there were more, but he was too tired and weak to find them. It did seem that what she offered was his only hope, that if he resisted he was only proving her point that he hated himself, but he was too well-trained in debate and browbeating to give in to anything when he was so tired. "I'll think about it," he said. "I need to rest."

"All right," T'Laren said. "I'll be back tomorrow."

She flicked off his speaker and left. Q closed his eyes and drifted back into half-sleep.

* * *

As she left sickbay, T'Laren consciously performed the disciplines to calm herself down. She had maintained complete outward control in the conversation with Q, and had not allowed herself to become sidetracked or misdirected. Inside, however, she was experiencing the descent from an adrenaline rush, something that should not have happened. Q was probably the most verbally skilled of all her patients, and demanded similar skill of his conversational opponents if he was to respect them. A single misstep, and she could have lost him. The conversation had been exhilarating, and a little bit frightening, and she had been too busy concentrating on winning to notice her internal control slipping.

__

It should not be this way. It should be instinct, second nature. I shouldn't have to work so hard for internal control all the time.

External control _was_ instinct. She showed exactly what she wanted to show, whether it was falsified emotion, a Vulcan mask, or her true inner feelings. But internal control had always eluded her. Even now, when she was better at it than she'd ever been before in her life, she still didn't feel truly Vulcan.

Enough. The problem wouldn't go away if she ignored it; but as there was nothing she could do about it now, and Q was higher priority, she could not afford to pay attention to it. As she headed for Anderson's office, she concentrated entirely on the task at hand. In order to keep beating Q at his own game, she needed to know more about him, from as many perspectives as possible.

* * *

"Well, certainly." Anderson leaned forward across the desk. "I'm not the only one you should talk to, if you want people's input on Q, though. Did you talk to Counselor Medellin?"

"I've spent the last three days doing that, while I waited for him to wake up," T'Laren said. "Counselor Medellin's a very insightful woman. The things she told me proved invaluable in my interview with Q today. But I need as many perspectives as possible. I'd like to talk to you and to as many members of the Science Department as I can, since they have frequent dealings with him."

"That's fine. How did your talk with him today go?"

"Quite well, I think." T'Laren allowed the faintest hint of a smile to cross her face-- not a full smile, since people were disturbed by the sight of a smiling Vulcan, but enough to subliminally reassure. "At least, as well as any talk with Q can go. I'm beginning to get the shape of what I'm up against."

Anderson grinned. "Don't say I didn't warn you." She leaned back again. "What would you like to talk about?"

"I'd like to begin with an incident I've wondered about," T'Laren said, steepling her fingers. "In the records, it states that a monitor was placed in Q's quarters after his second suicide attempt, and that it was removed after he went on a hunger strike to protest it." She saw Anderson tensing, and hastened to add, "Please note-- I'm not trying to second-guess your judgement, or make any criticisms of your decisions. I simply would like to understand the incident in a bit more detail."

Anderson smiled. "Have I been that oversensitive, Doctor?" she asked. "You don't need to be quite _that_ careful of my feelings."

"I'm glad." T'Laren let herself relax visibly. "I've dealt with far too many starship and starbase commanders who perceive any questions as a threat to their authority. I'm happy to see you're not like that."

"No. I'm not quite that much of a martinet." She leaned forward slightly. "I'm going to have to put the whole thing into the perspective of the time. You read in the files about Security Chief Ohmura's death?"

"I read that he died protecting Q from an assassin, yes."

"This was the situation. A human man named Tom Lindon came aboard with a collection of 19th and 20th century antiques, claiming to be an antiques dealer who'd heard about Q's interest in Earth antiques. Several of the items in his collection were weapons-- antique firearms-- but Commander Ohmura didn't consider that a problem. Lindon had impeccable credentials stating that he was in fact who he said he was, and it's far from illegal to sell antique weapons. Also, we were used to attacks from alien species no one ever heard of, not fellow humans. Ohmura checked that the firearms were unloaded, and let him through to see Q.

"Several people showed up to see what was going on; Q's not the only person on the base with an interest in antiques, and itinerant traders are usually a source of color and entertainment on a starbase. At some point, Lindon must have loaded one of the firearms-- I'm not sure how. I never got a chance to talk to Ohmura about it, and certainly _I_ didn't see him do it. But in any case, he waited until nearly everyone in the room was on one side, looking at his wares. He then pulled the gun and announced that he was going to kill Q.

"It was a stupid move on his part. There was a table between him and Q; Q could have ducked. Q didn't. I screamed at him to get down, but he froze. There was no one who could reach Lindon in time, and no time for anyone to draw a phaser. Ohmura was closest to Q; he threw himself in front of Q, knocking him down, and got a bullet in the back of the head." Anderson shook her head. "We think of 20th century weapons as antiques, almost harmless things when compared to today's weapons. But a bullet in the back of the skull is just as deadly to us today as it was to our ancestors four hundred years ago.

"Another security officer reached Lindon and disarmed him. Once we had him neutralized, he told us everything quite freely. He really was an antique dealer, who'd been approached by an alien woman named Jihana Melex to kill Q. According to him, Melex had given him strict orders not to harm anyone else. AWe tracked her down and captured her, where she corroborated Lindon's story. She also explained why she wanted Q dead-- about twenty years ago, he had come to her starship and put the crew through a particularly ruthless test. All of them failed but her. All of them died, but her. When she learned that her crewmates' murderer was on Starbase 56 and vulnerable, she came to Federation space, researched our defenses, and hired the antique dealer, who was quite taken with her.

"We asked Q about her story. I think we were all hoping he'd deny it. That Ohmura hadn't just died to protect a murderer. We'd never had any direct evidence of his crimes before, except for the ones he committed against the _Enterprise_. We all wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt-- at least I did. And all he said was that he'd been in a bad mood that day."

"Difficult to understand how _anyone_ could have that little conception of how to deal with people," T'Laren said.

"It is. It's very difficult. I tell you in confidence, Doctor, I wanted him dead. Lieutenant Commander Ohmura was a good man, friendly and warm, something you very rarely see in a security chief. He did his job well, and he could be intimidating as hell when he had to be, but when he was off-duty he was cheerful, kind... Too many security men are cold and suspicious all the time. Ohmura wasn't. Which might be what killed him, that he gave Lindon the benefit of the doubt. But everyone liked him and no one liked Q, and it'd just turned out that Q was a monster who'd deserved to die. Melex's story was heartwrenching. We could all understand why she'd want to kill Q; all of us have been on starships, all of us have seen fellow crew killed pointlessly. And the worst of it was that if Q had obeyed my order and ducked, Ohmura wouldn't have needed to knock him down and die for it. I sent Melex to Earth to be tried for conspiracy and attempted murder, but I couldn't really blame her for what she'd done. I blamed Lindon and I blamed Q.

"I wasn't the only one who blamed Q, as it turned out. He used to take long walks around the perimeter of the station. A few days after Ohmura's death, the security monitors on a portion of the perimeter went down. Q happened to be in that portion of the perimeter. Two human males ambushed him and beat him within an inch of his life. He said later that he couldn't identify his assailants, as the lighting was dim-- it was night on the base-- and they wore masks. But they had to be two of our own security. No one else would have had access to the security monitors to shut them down without Engineering noticing.

"I was furious. Mostly I was angry at the men who'd done it; regardless of our opinion of him, Q was still under our protection, and attacking an unarmed civilian is not Starfleet behavior. But partially I was angry at Q himself. I felt as if he'd provoked the attack. So I restricted his movements to the main areas of the base. He accused me of punishing him for being a victim... I denied it at the time, I said it was for his safety, but in retrospect he was right. I _was_ punishing him."

"Do you think he did do anything to provoke the attack? That perhaps it began as a verbal fight that escalated?"

"No. According to Q himself, the two simply grabbed him as he came around a corner, ripped off his combadge, and began beating him. All they said was that this was for Ohmura-- who would have despised such behavior in his department. I don't necessarily believe everything Q says, but when we finally caught the perpetrators, they didn't deny the accusation or try to claim he provoked them directly. Besides, there were the monitor failures. That had to be set up in advance. No, they set out to ambush Q."

"Did he make any attempt to fight back?"

"I doubt it. For someone that so many beings want dead, Q's singularly incompetent at defending himself. He's more skilled at verbal attacks and defense than anyone I've ever seen, but let it get physical and he's helpless. You wouldn't think so; he's a big man, but he has no idea how to use his body in a fight. I saw this at work once. In the early days of his time here, maybe two or three months after his arrival, he went into the bar in the transients' sector. We had a number of visitors in dock, most of whom didn't have anything to do with him. He said the wrong thing to the wrong being and all of a sudden he was a bloody pulp on the floor, screaming for help. I ordered him to take self-defense training after that, but... he's got no natural instinct to hit back. Q's first reaction to being attacked is to run. If he can't run, he curls up in a fetal ball and begs for mercy. It's not entirely ineffective-- most races find it hard to keep pounding on someone who's so abjectly helpless."

"Why do you think he can't fight back? He's certainly defended himself in the past--"

"--by turning people into ice cubes or eels or small babies, or sending them into oblivion, or any number of other creatively nasty attacks. Yes, I know. I wouldn't call those defenses, though. Let's face it, none of the people he did things like that to could possibly have hurt him. I think it's the fear of pain that paralyzes him. If you strike at someone, you become vulnerable yourself. He learned one or two techniques in theory, but he can't use them in an actual fight. When we started preparation for the Borg, he didn't have time for the self-defense classes anymore, especially considering how he stubbornly refused to get any use out of them, so I let him quit. Maybe I shouldn't have."

"He doesn't seem to learn anything from being attacked, then."

"Oh, he learns," Anderson said, with a touch of exasperation. "He just learns the wrong thing. He hasn't been back in the bar without bodyguards and an express invitation since he got beaten up there. Rather than learning not to antagonize people or how to defend himself, he's learned not to go to bars."

"Did he learn anything from being attacked by Security?"

"I'm not sure. We found the perpetrators and court-martialed them, but there continued to be a cold war between Q and Security. He kept complaining to me that they were making his life miserable, but there was nothing I could actually reprimand them for. Showing up late to escort him somewhere, staring at him while he ate, that sort of thing. And I admit I didn't try very hard to find some way to reprimand them. Q had made all of our lives miserable for close to two years now, and... it was just very easy to despise him." She shook her head. "It says something about humanity, you know. We believe we've come so far, we're so modern and compassionate and we've driven all the demons out of our souls. But even people in Starfleet, the best of the breed, are capable of beating a helpless civilian senseless as he pleads for mercy and then blaming him for the attack. What does that say about us? Sometimes I think you Vulcans had the right idea in getting rid of all emotion."

"It would be a poorer universe, if everyone in it was a Vulcan," T'Laren said. "And even Vulcans are capable of doing despicable things. I won't put any of this in any kind of report to Starfleet, Commodore; I don't think Starfleet analysts could understand the pressures you were under."

"I'm sometimes not sure I understand." Anderson put a hand to her forehead, supporting herself with an elbow on"the desk. "I haven't even really gotten to the worst part yet... After about two weeks of this, Q filled up his bathtub with water, smashed a ceramic mug to get a sharp edge, and cut his wrists."

"His bathtub?"

"Another of his antiques. You have to understand, cutting your wrists in the bathtub is the granddaddy of all melodramatic gestures. The cuts were shallow, they were across the wrist instead of along it, and he did this in the middle of the day, about two hours before he was scheduled to meet with visitors. There was almost no chance he would actually die before someone found him. I was furious with him. It was as if he was trying to shift the whole thing away from Ohmura's death and back to poor, poor pitiful Q. And I just didn't want to fall for it. I took away the bathtub and most of the other antiques, on the grounds that they were sharp or breakable or hard enough for him to crack his skull on, increased his replicator restrictions so he couldn't get anything dangerous-- etching solution never occurred to me, I'm afraid. But I was determined to prevent him from making any more of these ridiculous melodramatic gestures. I started thinking that his first suicide attempt hadn't been a serious attempt, either. That was a month or two after we defeated the Borg, and it seemed to me suddenly that that one had to have been a bid for attention and sympathy, too. And we fell for it. And I was damned if I was going to fall for it this time."

"But it seems to me as if the attempt might almost have been an apology," T'Laren said. From her talk with Q, she didn't think that attempt had been a bid for sympathy, but it seemed such a studiedly incompetent method of dying that it almost had to be a gesture of some sort. "A recognition that he'd done something horrible and that he couldn't live with the pain he'd caused. Did that interpretation occur to anyone?"

"Quite frankly, no. Q doesn't feel guilt. He doesn't understand the concept. Anyone who could dismiss the deaths of 45 sentient beings with 'I was in a bad mood that day' obviously doesn't feel guilt. Or at least, if he does, he spends a lot of effort to hide it. I've never seen him appear even slightly remorseful for anything."

"Mm. So at this point you put in the monitor?"

"Yes. He'd made a few token protests about the replicator restrictions and the loss of his collection. His argument was that he was still miserable, but Counselor Medellin had reminded him why he was putting up with this, which was the chance that he would get his powers back, and he wasn't going to do anything to jeopardize that again. I didn't believe him. He'd told me the last time he attempted suicide that he'd never try it again. And he didn't put up much of a fight. When I told him I'd put in the monitor, though, he became hysterical. He told me that a lack of privacy would in itself surely drive him to suicide again, and that he was going to go on a hunger strike until the monitor came out. And I said, 'Go ahead.'"

Anderson's voice dropped almost to a whisper on the last words. She was evidently unhappy with what she'd done. T'Laren thought she would appreciate a chance to explain herself, and obligingly asked, "Why?"

"In the first place, I didn't think he could go through with it. Q can't handle pain of any sort. Not that he couldn't go hungry for a few days; there were a few times during the work against the Borg that he literally forgot to eat for a day or two. And remind me later to tell you about that whole thing with the Borg later, because I think you need to know about it for balance, but I want to finish this. A day or two without eating wouldn't hurt him, I figured, and I didn't think he could stick it out longer than that. Also, he was terrified of boredom, and I was sure I could get him to eat if I had to by cutting off his computer access. And in a last resort we could force-feed him. This was just another one of his grand melodramatic gestures, and I still refused to fall for it.

"I had him watched. For two days he went about his daily business without eating. He didn't draw any attention to the fact that he wasn't eating, he just didn't eat. I was surprised. It isn't like Q to do anything quietly, and making a grand gesture seems rather pointless if you don't tell anyone about it. But I watched him, and on the third day, when he was supposed to receive important visitors, _then_ he chose to make his grand gesture. He announced to the world in general that he was going on a hunger strike to get the monitor out of his quarters, and that he refused to see any visitors or talk to anyone until the monitor was out. He then took to his bed.

"I cut off his computer access and waited for him to get bored and demand it back. He didn't. He sat in bed reading an antique book. So I sent security in to get his books, and I told him he'd get them back when he ate. He didn't say anything. Just stared at me. I expected him to break down about half an hour after that. He didn't. He stayed in bed, staring at the ceiling, for three days. On the third day--" She hesitated again, looking ashamed. "On the third day I had food smells pumped into his room through his air vents. I was sure that would do it. It didn't. He stayed in bed. So I gave in."

"Why was that the turning point?"

"If it was that important to him-- Q had said repeatedly in the past that he couldn't survive without computer access, that boredom would kill him, that sort of thing. Obviously this wasn't literally true, but it said something about his priorities. Going without food just said he had a bit more self-control than I'd thought. Putting up with utter boredom and simply staying in bed-- I mean, I was watching him. He didn't _do_ anything but sleep and stare at the ceiling. And that impressed me. It was a gesture, of course, but sometimes I think the only way Q can communicate is through gestures. He was telling me that this issue of privacy was more important than the thing he'd previously told me was the most important thing in his life. And when he still didn't respond after the food smells, I was ashamed of myself. I had expected that to break him quickly. If he had the self-control to hold out, then this had to be immensely important to him, and I was torturing him. I can be a hardass on occasion, but I like to think I'm not a torturer. So I took the monitor out."

She sighed. "Maybe I should have put it back in surreptitiously. But Q's not a prisoner here. He's legally a Federation citizen now; he's got rights. And if security hated me, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want a monitor of any sort in my quarters, either. Besides, he didn't seem suicidal anymore. I can't say he seemed happy to be alive, but he seemed pretty determined to stay that way, after the whole hunger strike thing was over. And I'd thought the whole thing was a gesture anyway, and that he'd learned that that particular gesture didn't work."

"Do you still think it was a gesture? In the light of current events?"

"I don't know. I'd still like to believe it was. Because if he was genuinely trying to do himself in... then we drove him to it, that time at least. He came here for protection and we pushed him into trying to kill himself."

T'Laren hesitated. That seemed the likeliest alternative, from what she had gathered. But she was in no position to judge. She had done far worse in her time than drive an unstable man to the brink of suicide. "I won't deny that Starbase 56 hasn't been the best emotional climate for him. But you shouldn't be too hard on yourself, either. Humans have limits. As do Vulcans. As, apparently, do members of the Q Continuum, or Q would still be their problem and not ours."

Anderson made a slightly impatient gesture of negation, shaking her head once and chopping the air with a half-clenched fist. "The thing is that he isn't completely hopeless. Or he wasn't, two years ago. When we were working against the Borg, it was like he was a different man."

"Yes, you did say you wanted to tell me about that time. What was different?"

"When he first came here, his first month or so, he was at his absolute worst. I think he was testing the limits, seeing how much he could get away with. But in the third or fourth month, we started preparations against the Borg. And since Q knew more about the Borg than any of us, there was never any question but that he'd have a focal role in preparing for our defense.

"He knew approximately when they'd be arriving, so we knew we were under a time constraint. And we had scientists, engineers, tacticians, all sorts of people coming through here to talk to Q-- and he behaved himself beautifully. It really was as if he were a different man. He still got impatient, but he was almost never nasty or obnoxious, and never obstructionist. He drove himself the way the rest of us did-- in some respects more; I think he got less sleep than any other human on the project. He routinely pulled 20, 22-hour shifts. There were times when he'd forget to eat for a day or two."

Anderson leaned forward, holding T'Laren's gaze intently, as she continued. "I do want to put this in perspective-- I'm not trying to imply that Q did anything superhuman, or anything that the rest of us didn't do. All of us pushed ourselves. But we were Starfleet, trained for this sort of crisis, and we were fighting for our homes and our lives. At one point Q said he expected to be struck by a bolt from the blue any minute now, for helping us against the Borg, and we all laughed. Later I asked him about it, and I found out he was serious. The Q Continuum apparently does have something roughly equivalent to a Prime Directive, and he was thrown out, in part, for breaking it. What we were planning to do, what he had advised us and helped us to do, would be tantamount to genocide. And he fully expected he was going to be punished, probably killed, for using his knowledge to do this. All the rest of us were fighting to preserve our lives and the lives of our families and friends. Q was actually risking his life in helping us."

"Why did he do it?"

"Oh, he said that he was fighting to preserve his own life, the same as the rest of us. The Borg would certainly kill him; the Q Continuum might or might not. But there were other things he said, when asked less baldly, that implied he just didn't want to see humanity destroyed. That whether he lived or died, he would rather see us destroy the Borg than vice versa. And I started to genuinely respect him. He was still too abrasive to really like, but he'd come so far, transcended all the whining and the self-pitying and the selfish demands. He was less physically suited for this than any of us, and he had less at stake than any of us, and he still managed to rise to the occasion with the rest of us. I was proud we had him here, then. I was glad to be protecting him.

"And then we won. We managed to crash the Borg net, rendering them effectively helpless, and the joint Klingon-Federation fleet carved their ship into little bits. We had a victory party, and then everyone went home... and Q reverted to the same selfish bastard he'd been when he arrived. He'd shown that he was capable of matching the best humanity had to offer, and then he slid back. I was furious. If he could behave himself when it was important, obviously he knew how. So if he was being an asshole again, it was by choice. He _wanted_ to be an asshole. He chose to do this. He'd shown me a glimpse of a decent human being under that facade, and then he'd gone and covered up that glimpse with mud. Do you understand how betrayed I felt?"

"I think so," T'Laren said.

"I _know_ there's the potential to be a halfway decent person in there. I've _seen_ it. But he negates it, and I don't know what would be worse; him not having any potential at all, or the fact that he does and he doesn't use it. If he were nothing but a complete selfish monster, I could just hate him. Or take him out of the category of sentient beings and put him in with forces of nature, like black holes. But there's just enough humanity in him that I can't do that. I think that makes it worse. Because I have to feel sorry for him when he self-destructs, as well as angry at him for the people he hurts along the way. It'd be easier if I could just hate him."

"It's always easier to hate," T'Laren said. "That's why Starfleet tries so hard to train it out of its officers. I hope you're right, that there is some potential in there I can reach. I think there is."

"I hope I'm right too and that it turns out you _can_ reach it. Because Q may be valuable as a source of information, but he's worthless as a human being. And his life and the lives of everyone around him are going to be miserable as long as that's the case."

* * *

Lieutenant Amy Frasier, biologist, was considerably less forgiving than Commodore Anderson. "No. There's no potential in there. He's just a complete bastard."

"Why do you say so?" T'Laren asked.

Frasier was a beautiful human woman with a slim, sensual body, ringlets of red hair, porcelain-pale skin and eyes the color of Vulcan blood. At the moment, though, her beauty was marred by a scowl of hatred. "I've had the misfortune of working with Q for three years. He's entirely despicable. A monster. He's killed god knows how many beings and tortured however many more for nothing more than his amusement, and he'd do it again if he got his powers back. I've asked never to be left in charge of him, because I don't know what I'd do. Our mission's supposed to be to protect him, for the sake of his knowledge, but I don't think he's given us a damn thing we couldn't have gotten ourselves, _including_ the victory over the Borg, and if one of these alien assassins ever does manage to get him I'll dance on his grave."

This sort of vitriol didn't exist in a vacuum. "Did he ever do anything to you personally?" T'Laren asked.

"No," Frasier said, lying. The flash of fury in her eyes, the slight clenching of teeth and hands, all said "yes". The "no" was simply to inform T'Laren that she didn't want to talk about it or acknowledge it. "No more than he does to anyone else. Maybe I just see through all his bullshit more easily."

Lieutenant Frasier wasn't exactly going to be a mine of information, T'Laren decided. More like a minefield. "Well, thank you for letting me talk to you."

"Don't be fooled by him, Doctor," Frasier said, as T'Laren got up. "He may seem perfectly nice and innocent at first. But as soon as he's found a way under your skin, he goes for the jugular."

"I'm a Vulcan," T'Laren said. "I doubt my jugular is located where Q thinks it is."

* * *

Lieutenant Harry Roth, physicist, was helpful in shedding some light on Frasier's opinions. "You can't take anything Frasier says seriously," he said, laughing. "At least not where it comes to men, and especially not when it comes to Q."

Roth was a slim, tall man with short curly black hair, a big nose, and expressive brown eyes. He wasn't particularly handsome, but he was pleasant to look at. Where Frasier had thrown off deadly radiation as soon as the subject of Q came up, Roth seemed cheery and sociable, with a pleasant British-accented speaking voice. T'Laren recognized that she would have a tendency to take his opinions more seriously because he was more personable, and filed the knowledge away under the heading of combatting her own biases. She had never achieved the Vulcan ideal of eliminating emotion, but she would acknowledge it, master it, and keep it from interfering. "Why do you say so?" she asked.

"Well. Amy is... uh, there's not really any polite way to say this. Let's say Amy is a connoisseur of males. Klingons, Andorians, Betazoids, Rigellians... if it comes to this starbase, it's humanoid and it has three legs, she'll attempt to seduce it. She's even bragged about catching one or two Vulcan males. I'm not sure how much credence to give _that._"

"It's possible," T'Laren said. "The sort of Vulcans that go into Starfleet are generally not good upstanding Vulcan citizens. I believe the word actually would be 'perverts'." She gave him another of her almost-smiles. "Certainly Lieutenant Frasier's hypothetical partners wouldn't be the first Vulcans I've heard about who've had casual liaisons with humans."

"Really." Roth grinned. "I suppose you guys can't all be as steadfastly monogamous as you like us to think."

"Monogamy is illogical," T'Laren said blandly. "Sex is a learned skill, after all. How is one to maximize one's ability without studying from multiple sources?"

Roth laughed. "You _are_ joking, aren't you?" he said. "I never know with you folks. Commander Sekal is terribly serious3/4 I suppose I always assumed that all of you fit the stereotype, because he does so well."

"I am a very atypical Vulcan," T'Laren said. "Yes, it was intended as a joke."

"A joking Vulcan! Next I'll be meeting a Betazoid security officer!" Roth sobered a bit. "In all seriousness, however, I really wouldn't give a lot of weight to Amy's opinions regarding Q. As I've said, Amy collects new and different males. She liked Q fine for the first three months he was here-- in fact, she liked Q fine when no one else liked him at all, since he was quite the miserable bastard when first he got here. Then all of a sudden he became the Anti-Christ. I don't believe it's too difficult to piece together events."

"You believe they had an affair?"

"Oh, no, no, certainly not. I believe that was Amy's intention, however. Or rather, she no doubt intended a single night of pleasure, as she rarely keeps her men after the initial novelty's worn off. She's... not exactly subtle, either. I've been on the other side of her wiles once or twice. It's like being hit with a sledgehammer. And Q seems to be remarkably impervious to feminine charms, or anyone's charms for that matter. A sledgehammer is what it would take to get him to notice."

"So Frasier hit him with a sledgehammer."

"And he undoubtedly eviscerated her in response. Q is... well, I wouldn't want him rejecting _me_. Mind you, all this is rumor and guesswork. Amy doesn't talk about her failures and Q doesn't talk about sex, or his lack thereof, at all. But I imagine it had to have been fairly nasty, or she'd have spread rumors that she'd gotten him to drop drawers for her anyway. She does with most men. At one point the rumor mill was full of my supposed fling with her, before my co-workers learned just how much my type Amy is not."

"How much your type _is_ Lieutenant Frasier not?" T'Laren asked, and then shook her head. "I have no idea if that sentence made any sense."

Roth grinned. "Well, it's my phrasing, so I understand you. For one thing, Amy's the wrong sex."

"Ah. That would do it." T'Laren had been wondering if Roth's cheerily cruel descriptions of Frasier's activities might stem from some sort of sexual betrayal. It seemed unlikely now. "Then if I can't trust Frasier's opinions regarding Q, can I ask you for yours?"

"Mine are rather heretical, I'm afraid," Roth said, smiling. "I don't actually mind him. When he's in his better moods, I rather enjoy talking to him."

"That does seem somewhat heretical. Can you explain?"

"Nothing easier. I worship intelligence, Dr. T'Laren. In my business, I have to deal with so many obnoxious posers and egotistical bastards who think they're the best thing that ever happened to Federation physics since Zephram Cochrane. Q genuinely _is._ I can put up with a great deal of arrogance from someone who's got the ability to back it up, and I'd say Q does. Beyond a doubt he's the brightest individual I've ever met, and I've met some of the Federation's brightest minds. I won't say I'd like to be his pal, or even that I could stand being locked in a room with him for forty-eight hours, but in small doses I find him quite tolerable."

"The fact that he goes out of his way to offend and annoy people doesn't work with you?"

"Well, you have to understand that Q does that sort of thing to varying degrees, depending on who he's dealing with. He respects intelligence. He has no respect for anything else. Q has no need for any of our social constructs, any of our little pleasantries. He doesn't care what your rank is or what sex you are or what you look like. He cares about exactly one thing: are you bright enough to hold a conversation with him without boring him? And I myself am not exactly stupid. I wouldn't put myself in Q's league, but I think he has some respect for me. So perhaps he's a little less cruel to me than he might be to others. And being bright and arrogant myself, I've got an awfully thick skin. He's occasionally said something that offended me deeply-- especially when he first arrived. He _was_ a true bastard then. I think he's mellowed somewhat since. But the thing you have to understand is that he doesn't mean any of it personally. Brutally witty repartee seems to be the only way he knows how to relate to people. And since he's not my roomie or my brother or my superior officer, I don't have to put up with it all the time. It's occasionally refreshing to try to match wits with him for a while."

"Yes, I've noticed that myself."

"So I just learned not to take it personally. Verbal combat is an old and honorable form of interaction, after all. I wouldn't want to be limited to it, but an occasional joust does me no harm. And there are certainly some pompous bastards who've been in here that were desperately asking for a good skewering. I have occasionally stood on the sidelines and secretly cheered as Q deflated some balloon-head. And his presence here does bring the brightest. So I can't actually say that I have any reason to dislike him, at least not with the fervor that most of the base seems to devote to it."

"Have you ever talked to him seriously? Without verbal jousting?"

"About physics, yes. Quite often. About anything personal... not really, aside from the fact that when he's in a mood he complains constantly. That does get a bit tedious, I have to admit. But listening to Q whine is usually much more entertaining than listening to some pompous ambassador say _anything_, so even that doesn't put me out much." He frowned slightly. "Rumor has it that you've come to take him off our hands."

"That's the theory."

"I may be the only person on the base that'll miss him at all," Roth said with an ironic half-smile. "How is he, anyway?"

"Physically, he's improving. I intend to have him out of bed and getting some exercise before the week's out, though I may have an argument with Dr. Li about that. Mentally, though..." She shook her head. "His condition's not very good. I have a great deal of work ahead of me to convince him that his best option isn't death."

"I really am sorry to hear that. I don't suppose they'd let me in to visit, would they? Or would it be a good idea at all?"

"It can't hurt to let him know that someone actually does not dislike him. He won't be able to talk back to you, however, so keep it short and try not to say anything he'd want to argue with."

"That's quite an order," Roth said, smiling wryly. "Not saying anything he'd want to argue with might be a physical impossibility."

"True."

* * *

Lieutenant Commander Gretchen Wernicke, morphologist, didn't know Q personally well at all. "I don't have a lot of dealings with him," she admitted, "which suits me fine. But I have to tell you, I'd take anything Harry or Frasier told you with a grain of salt."

"Lieutenant Roth warned me that Lieutenant Frasier may have ulterior motives in her hatred of Q."

Wernicke, despite her Germanic name, was a tiny, nervous black woman with short hair, skin the color of chocolate mousse, and a habit of pacing. "He did, did he? Well, he would. His theory's that Frasier hates Q because Q rejected her, right?"

"More or less."

"It could well be true. I don't know. But whatever Harry said about Q himself, you have to worry about the same problem from the opposite direction."

"The same problem? I'm not sure I take your meaning."

"Look, Harry probably told you and if he didn't, I will. He likes men. And Q himself-- seems to attack women a lot worse than men. Maybe that's just my personal bias, but that's how it looks to me. He's nasty to everyone, but I always got the impression he saves the heavy artillery for women. He goes easier on men. You have to wonder."

"You think Lieutenant Roth and Q--"

"Oh, no. Not like that-- I don't think it ever got that far. I mean, it couldn't have, I don't care how discreet they were, it'd have gotten on the rumor mill. I'm almost surprised it didn't anyway, considering that everyone knows Harry's tastes and that he can actually stand Q. Me, Q's not my type. I didn't think he was attractive when he first showed up and he certainly looks like hell now. But he's definitely Harry's type-- bright, human, male, over 180 cm and not visibly deformed. Harry's not that picky."

"But you don't think anything actually did happen between them."

"Who wants to risk asking Q for anything? Frasier's not my favorite person, but one thing I can say, she's not exactly sensitive about rejection. Whatever Q did to her, it'd probably turn anyone else into a radioactive puddle of protoplasm. And Harry's a pretty sensitive guy. I mean, I could be totally wrong about all this. But I don't think Harry would even dare drop hints unless Q sent him an engraved invitation, and that's going to happen around the time the sun goes nova. Not that Q would notice hints, either."

All of this was interesting, and somewhat helpful, but T'Laren was interested in more than rumors about Q's sex life. "What is your own opinion of Q?"

Wernicke shrugged. "Like I said, I don't see him much-- there isn't much use for him in my specialty. I study the physical and neural structure of humanoid bodies. Q's structure is human; not much he can add there, and it's not a subject he knows anything about, except to occasionally contradict me by citing some ridiculous alien species that lives three galaxies away and none of us will ever see. From what I've seen... he's a jerk. I'm glad I don't have to work with him much. I don't have a very strong opinion one way or another, though I do keep wondering how a guy as old as he is could possibly be so incompetent with people. I mean, what do his own people do? Spend all their time arguing with each other? Or is that why they threw him out?"

"I'm not sure," T'Laren said.

"I tell you something, if I ever got to be a few million years old, _I_ wouldn't act like a spoiled teenager. Maybe that makes me an inferior being. If so, I say long live inferiority. And if he's the future of humanity, maybe we should pack it in now."

"I doubt he is."

"I hope so. But I really don't have anything to add or whatever. Maybe you ought to talk to Commander Sekal, he works with Q a lot."

T'Laren had no desire to talk to a fellow Vulcan for any reason whatsoever. "Perhaps I will," she said blandly, having even less desire to share her feelings with Commander Wernicke.

* * *

In the end, Sekal cornered her. "It has come to my attention that you've been interviewing various members of my department regarding their impressions of Q."

There could be no faking it, not with a real Vulcan. And that was ironic, because it was being faced with a fellow Vulcan that made T'Laren's pulse race and her throat go dry, far more than anything else could have. She had to remind herself that he didn't know her, had no idea of her disgrace, and couldn't actually see inside her skull the way Soram could. The fact that his tall, chiseled asceticism reminded her a lot of Soram didn't help. T'Laren forced down the panic, suppressing rather than mastering it, and responded coolly. "That is correct."

"I had wondered if you planned to interview me as well. My experience in dealing with Q is not inconsiderable."

__

Can anyone explain to me why circumlocutions and expressions like "not inconsiderable" are somehow more logical than coming straight to the point?

"My interest is in gaining a picture of Q's emotional state and relations with fellow humans. It had not occurred to me that you would have any insight into his emotional condition that you would wish to share with me." _No. All wrong. I sound as if I'm accusing him of a lack of insight and of withholding information, in the same sentence._ "Few Vulcans make a study of human emotional states, and--" Horrified, she trailed off, realizing she had no idea what to say next. "And I did not want to impose on you," she finished, somewhat lamely.

Sekal raised an eyebrow. "I have lived among humans for thirty-three years now," he said. "It is impossible to function in Starfleet without some understanding of humans. And my work would be impossible without some understanding of Q. If only the ability to understand that he is likely to be particularly obstructionist under given circumstances."

"I see. I should then avail myself of your understanding." She wished fervently he didn't look so much like Soram. Her control would be so much better if he didn't remind her of Soram.

"That is acceptable," Sekal said. "Shall we go to my office?"

"That would be best," T'Laren said, inwardly convinced it was far from best. _How can I have so many years of experience as a counselor, know so much about the psychology of aliens, and be so incompetent when it comes to my own kind? Lhoviri, are you sure this repair job of yours has really taken at all?_

In Sekal's office, he motioned T'Laren to a seat and took one himself. He folded his hands on his desk. "I do not wish to invade your privacy," he said. "It has become obvious, however, that you are somewhat distressed in my presence."

It took all of T'Laren's control to keep from turning visibly green. No Vulcan on Vulcan would ever be so forward. Was he just rude from years with humans, as she was, or had he decided to treat her as human because of her obviously feeble control? "My logic is unimpaired."

"I make no accusations. Nor do I judge by the standards of the homeworld. There are too few Vulcans in Starfleet for us to condemn one another. If your distress arises from a belief that I would consider you less for your human behaviors, be assured that that is not the case. I fully understand that a counselor for humans must adopt human behavior to set them at ease, and that such a facade is not easily dropped."

He was giving her a way to save face, a logical reason for her lack of control. T'Laren felt absurdly grateful. It was illogical to judge all Vulcans by her family and Soram, after all. Even little Sovaz, Soram's own sister, proved that not all Vulcans were judgmental. "I was raised among humans," T'Laren explained. "And I have spent most of my life among them. It creates difficulties."

"I understand the problem. My wife, T'Meth, is a security officer. Fellow Vulcans have occasionally accused her of failing to live up to Surak's principles of pacifism. It apparently never occurred to them to apply Surak's principle of IDIC. So I am acquainted with the difficulty."

His wife? Yes, of course he had a wife. All Vulcan men of a certain age had wives. Soram probably had another wife by now, too. Undoubtedly a calm and logical scientist who had spent her entire life on Vulcan and didn't like sex. And none of this had anything to do with Q. T'Laren wrenched herself from speculations on Soram's current circumstances and back to the subject. "What observations have you made regarding Q?" she asked.

"Three months ago," Sekal began, "Q came to my office seeking information on the Vulcan disciplines. He wished to understand the difference between Vulcan lack of emotion and human apathy. Initially I was wary, suspecting this to be a prelude to some sort of attack."

"Q often comes to your office to attack you?"

"It has happened. Q varies his tactics depending on who he's dealing with. Usually his tactic with me is to condemn Vulcan discipline as a wasted effort, useless at best and actively harmful at worst."

"Yet at the same time he's attacked humans for their emotions."

"I know. I pointed this out to him once. He replied that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

"That's a quote, actually," T'Laren said. "Or rather a misquote. Emerson said, 'A _foolish_ consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.'"

"I fear I've given Terran literature less attention than it deserves," Sekal said. "The point is that Q doesn't concern himself with being consistent. He attacks for the sake of attack. He conceives of himself as a devil's advocate, whose role in life is to challenge everyone and everything. So I expected that this would be a prelude to some sort of attack. Instead, it quickly became obvious that Q felt he had a genuine need for the information." Sekal hesitated. "I do not like to speculate without hard facts. But I believe that Q is not used to the intensity of human emotion, that he has never become used to it, and that it disturbs him."

"Surely the Q experience emotion."

"Surely they do. But I would imagine it's far less intense than what humans feel. When one's anger can destroy galaxies, one undoubtedly takes care to get angry rarely. In addition, as a being of pure thought Q would not have been subject to the hormonal fluctuations that make up so much of emotion."

"Has he ever spoken to you of the Continuum?"

"Once or twice. He dislikes talking about it, so I don't press him. He once analogized someone asking him about the Continuum to someone asking a crippled former marathoner how it felt to run in races. I could understand his point." He steepled his hands. "In any case. In our discussion, he made it quite clear that he sought to free himself from emotion, as much as humanly possible. He told me that he alternated between misery and apathy, that he could no longer bear either state, and that he feared his life would become entirely unbearable if he couldn't find a third alternative. So he wished to know how Vulcans perceive our lack of emotion, why we do not-- I believe his words were 'kill yourselves out of boredom.'"

"What did you tell him?"

"I explained that the Vulcan disciplines do not destroy all feelings. Vulcans are capable of feeling contentment, even happiness, certainly satisfaction. Obviously, the converse is true as well. Vulcan discipline permits us to overcome periods of unhappiness and dissatisfaction, so that we can attempt to find a logical solution to our problems. He asked me what a Vulcan would do if crippled, blinded, and exiled among hostile strangers, with little hope of return-- what the logical solution to that would be."

"Many Vulcans would in fact believe the logical solution to be suicide," T'Laren said softly.

"I'm aware of that, but I thought it unwise to tell Q so. I told him that if there was any hope the situation would ever be corrected, the Vulcan solution would be to hold out in hope of a better future. He then asked if he could learn the disciplines. I explained that no human has ever successfully adopted the Vulcan disciplines in full, even when trained in them from childhood. Q insisted that he was an exception, that his native intelligence should permit him to learn anything he wanted to. I further explained that he was far too old to learn-- even Vulcan children need to begin training before adulthood. He pointed out that his body was actually only three years old, chronologically, and that by the standards of the Continuum he was a young Q, approximately equivalent to an adolescent."

"I've suspected that," T'Laren said, who had heard it from Lhoviri already. It was nice to have some independent confirmation of Lhoviri's statements, however.

"As have I. But his youth in terms of his species is irrelevant, and I told him so. His body is physiologically in its late thirties or early forties. His brain is almost certainly not flexible enough to adopt an entirely new thinking process, and even if it were, the human brain is not designed for the sort of things Vulcan brains can do. He grew more and more insistent that he could overcome all these obstacles. Finally, I made it clear to him that he could not learn the Vulcan disciplines, at which point..." Sekal almost looked embarrassed. "He began to cry. Needless to say, I was startled and a bit discomfited by this. He was quite hysterical, insisting that this was his only hope. If he killed himself, there was no chance his people would take him back. He had to hang on to his mortal existence if he were to have any hope of regaining his powers, and he said he couldn't bear to stay alive much longer. If he couldn't learn the Vulcan disciplines, or some way to stop feeling, his misery would kill him."

"Did this seem like his usual theatrics to you, or did he seem sincere?"

"Difficult to tell. I'm not used to dealing with crying humans. I felt rather out of my depth, and offered to call Medellin, but Q begged me not to tell any human beings of this. He told me that if a human were to learn how he'd lost control, he couldn't live with the shame. I could understand his point. Thus I gave my word I would tell no humans of this."

"You were manipulated," T'Laren said flatly.

"How so?"

"Q undoubtedly would feel shame at having an emotional weakness exposed to other humans. But that shame would be nothing equivalent to what a Vulcan would feel. Q used his knowledge of the Vulcan psyche to manipulate you into keeping his secret."

"Perhaps. I am aware that the shame would not be equivalent, though. And there is another aspect to this that you don't know."

"Indeed." T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "Please explain."

"Q has been known to become paranoid," Sekal said. "I have sometimes wondered if he suffers from mental illness beyond his obvious depression. You have undoubtedly been told of the incidents surrounding Commander Ohmura's death?"

"I know the situation."

"A regrettable circumstance." Sekal shook his head, very slightly. "And an example of human illogic at its worst. Most of the population of Starbase 56 held Q responsible for Commander Ohmura's death, in part because his actions in the past brought an assassin and in part because he froze under pressure. Of course, as a civilian with no training in how to behave under pressure, Q's reaction is understandable, and the Federation had already determined that we would not hold him responsible for crimes he committed as an omnipotent being. Thus leaving no reason to blame Q; Ohmura died in the line of duty, nothing more. But few humans saw it that way."

"I've heard."

"Perhaps you've heard the rest of it, then. Has anyone discussed with you Q's reaction to the events around Ohmura's death?"

"His suicide attempt was described. If you're speaking of some other reaction--"

"I am."

"Then assume I know nothing."

"Very well." Sekal closed his eyes, apparently marshaling his thoughts. "Three days after Lieutenant Commander Ohmura died, two security officers conspired to ambush Q and beat him savagely. Though Q couldn't identify his attackers personally, he was convinced they were security. Commodore Anderson resisted this interpretation at first; later evidence proved that Q was correct. By then the damage was done. Q became convinced that the humans on the base were involved in a conspiracy to kill him. He approached my wife, T'Meth, begging her to protect him, since he felt he could trust no other security officers. At first T'Meth agreed, as the identity of his attackers was unknown. Once the culprits were discovered and court-martialed, it seemed to T'Meth as if the danger to Q was past. It was highly unlikely, based on her experience with those in her department, that anyone else in security would violate their Starfleet oath in such fashion.

"Q disagreed, violently. He feared all of security, was convinced that they were out to kill him, believed that Commodore Anderson was in on the plot, and insisted that T'Meth should remain with him at all times. At this point T'Meth realized he was being irrational and paranoid, and refused to feed his fantasies any longer. She ceased acting as his personal bodyguard. He then decided that she was in on the plot as well. A week later he tried to kill himself."

This was an interesting development. "I see."

"When Q specifically requested that I not tell any humans of how he had lost control, I suspected he might be growing paranoid again. I felt that perhaps he feared that Counselor Medellin would... use what she knew of him to control him, or some such thing. And it seemed that if I told Medellin, Q would lose any trust in me that he had, as he had lost his trust in my wife a year ago. Whereas if I gave my word that I would not speak to her, he might continue to confide in me. I am no expert on human psychology, but better that he confide in me than that he have no one to talk to at all, and end up suiciding."

"Ah." T'Laren nodded. "Did he?"

"No. He never spoke of it again." Sekal looked down at the desk. "I studied him for some time after that, looking for further signs of illness. I had given my word I wouldn't speak to Medellin of what he and I had discussed; if new evidence came to light, I would be free to tell her of my suspicions. However, I saw no obvious signs of further deterioration, and I could not very well speak to Medellin on the basis of a 'hunch'. So I believed. And so I kept my word, and my silence, until it was too late."

"It is illogical to blame yourself," T'Laren said. "You are not trained to deal with such situations. Your actions were as correct as they could be under the circumstances."

"I understand this. But I find that in this case it is difficult to make myself believe it."

"Then don't," T'Laren said. "If you cannot eliminate the guilt, accept it and work to do better in the future. Perhaps you should strive to understand human beings a little bit more, so that this situation will likely not occur again."

"Yes," Sekal said quietly. "That is..." His expression changed very slightly, the tiny subtleties of what passed for a smile between Vulcans. "Logical."

T'Laren stood. "You have assisted me greatly,"she said. "I thank you."

"As I thank you for your assistance. Live long and prosper, T'Laren."

"Peace and long life, Sekal."

* * *

She had left Q alone to consider her offer for two days now. It was more than time to talk to him.

Q smiled as she approached. At this point she suspected it was more because he'd now be allowed to talk rather than happiness at seeing her. She flicked on the speaker. "How do you feel?" she asked.

"Li says I'll be able to get out of this bed and start eating real food in about a week. I just care about the bed, myself, but apparently it's a package deal. They can't let me get up until they can stop feeding me through a tube in my stomach or whatever they've got under this arcane device." He meant the diagnostic unit, indicating it with a weakly waved hand.

"Very good. How do you feel?"

"Harry Roth was in here to visit yesterday. He had some sort of maudlin nonsense about how he hoped I felt better and that sort of thing. Did you put him up to it?"

"No. He asked if it would be permitted, and I said yes. It was entirely his own idea, however."

"Oh. Because it's embarrassing. Quite frankly, I'd forgotten Harry existed. It might be just as well that I couldn't talk, because I imagine he'd have been rather upset at what I'd have had to say. I don't _like_ that sort of thing."

"Don't you? I've always had the impression you were rather fond of getting attention."

"I-- well, yes, I do. But this is _embarrassing._ I barely know the man."

"I assure you, he's not under the impression that the two of you are best friends. He simply wished to let you know that there are some people aboard this starbase who care whether you live or die for your own sake and not for your value to the Federation."

"Yes, well, that's all very wonderful, I suppose, but it wasn't necessary. I put up with enough of that sort of thing from Counselor Medellin."

T'Laren wondered if Q's embarrassment might be because he was, consciously or unconsciously, picking up on what Gretchen Wernicke had seen in Roth. "Exactly why does that embarrass you?"

"Because it's silly and sentimental and I don't need it."

Or perhaps he was embarrassed because he _did_ need it and was trying not to let it show. She would have to explore this with him later. "You have twice now avoided the question of how you feel," she said. "What are you trying to avoid telling me?"

"Physically I feel fine. Bored out of my mind, numb between the chest and knees, and weak as a starving Znarian spiderweb-dancer, but I'm not in any pain. I don't even itch anywhere-- I think they're giving me some kind of drug that suppresses that. I may be covered with bedsores when I get out of here, but I can't feel them now. Is that what you wanted to hear?"

"That's part of it. There's another part."

"Ah, yes. My mental state." Q smiled unpleasantly. "How odd that you should ask that. I've been doing a bit of research, Dr. T'Laren. Some very interesting things have come to light. And I've also been doing a good bit of thinking about your offer."

T'Laren resigned herself. There were some patients that simply would not stay on the subject. Besides, she needed to know what he thought of the offer anyway. "And what have you decided?"

"Well, it seemed like an excellent idea when I last talked to you. In fact, the only reason I didn't say I'd go with you then and there was that I was tired and I knew I might miss something. And so yesterday I was very bored, and not very tired, and so I lay here thinking over your marvelous offer. And for the first time, it occurred to me to wonder. What is a psychologist, a former Starfleet officer, doing with a spiffy prototype spaceship?"

"Did it occur to you that perhaps Starfleet gave it to me?"

"No, that didn't occur to me at all, for the simple reason that it's impossible. I may be a civilian, but considering that I'm a Starfleet scientific advisor their technologists keep me abreast of current warp theory, that sort of thing. Being what I am, and doing what I do, I have to be on the cutting edge of Starfleet warp technology. Or at least to know where, exactly, that edge is. And no new developments have been made in power, endurance, fuel efficiency, or any other factor that would lead to a significant improvement in speed since I worked with them to defeat the Borg. The maximum Starfleet vessels could handle then is still the maximum. And of course, all this doesn't address the question of what a psychologist would be doing with a prototype ship, anyway-- I looked up your records, and you're no engineer. And my ego may be immense, but even I know I'm not _that_ important to the Federation-- they wouldn't waste such a prototype on me. So either you're lying or you got the ship somewhere else. And considering that on a Starfleet salary you're unlikely to have bought it at a Ferengi yard sale, I would very much like to know where you _did_ get it."

"That's a fair question." She considered her words. "I would rather not give the intimate details. However, the essence of the story is that the ship was given to me, after I left Starfleet, by a powerful member of an alien race, more advanced than the Federation. It was payment for services rendered, the treatment of the individual's younger brother."

"Which alien race?"

"I'd rather not say. Some of their number have in the past been hostile to the Federation, and while you may not care, there are security monitors in here."

"There are a number of alien races that want me dead. _Which_ alien race?"

No more room for half-truths; it was time for an outright lie. "The Yoma," she said.

"I've never heard of them."

"I doubt even you know every single race in all the galaxy."

"And how did you come upon them?"

T'Laren pressed her lips together. "A personal matter. I do not wish to discuss it."

"Well, how convenient."

Apparently the usual tactics were not working. T'Laren didn't expect that this one would work, either, but she had to try it. "Are you accusing me of lying to you?"

"Sounds like it, doesn't it?"

"I am a Vulcan."

"And Vulcans can lie when it suits their purpose. As you must know far better than I."

Well, she'd been right. It _didn't_ work. "What exactly is so unbelievable about what I've said?"

"Oh, I am so glad you asked that." He moved his hand on his computer's tracball. "Thank you, by the way, for browbeating Li into giving me my computer back. I would never have found any of this without it. Exhibit A!"

The screen showed T'Laren's Starfleet record, the unclassified version. "T'Laren of Vulcan, formerly T'Laren Dorset of Texas, Earth," Q said. "I notice you didn't use your Terran last name when you entered the Academy. Excellent grades, though on the low side for a Vulcan, abysmal math scores for a Vulcan but still reasonable for a psychology major, meritorious service blah blah blah." The screen scrolled down to the bottom, her discharge record. "Medical discharge from Starfleet, two years ago. Counselor T'Laren of the starship _Benjamin Franklin_ is granted a discharge for medical reasons and so forth. Signed by Captain Don Freeman of the _Franklin_, Chief Medical Officer M'Lei, also of _Franklin_\-- and Commander Janifer Stout of Starfleet Command, Psychology &amp; Morale Division." He turned his head and looked up at her. "Now under most circumstances, you only need two signatures on a medical discharge-- the captain's or commodore's or whatever, and the chief medical officer. The only circumstances where you need three is when it's a psych discharge, in which case the counselor's name is on it if there is a counselor. With me so far?

"But here's a case where the third name _isn't_ the counselor's, it's a desk jockey's. And then it occurred to me that _you_ were the counselor. What does one do when one's counselor goes bonkers? Assuming that she's lucid enough to try to hide her condition, the CMO might not be authorized to discharge her. After all, CMO's get psych training, but maybe they're not quite good enough to catch a psychologist with Vulcan training who knows how to hide what's wrong. This Dr. M'Lei would have been authorized to relieve you of duty-- not to discharge you from Starfleet. For that, they'd have to bump it up to a higher authority, preferably a psychologist. And what do you know? Commander Stout is also Dr. Stout, a practicing psychologist. So the precise reason for your precipitous departure from Starfleet may be classified where I can't get at it. But I can make a reasonable guess that you left for mental illness. Especially since you told me you tried to kill yourself two years ago, which-- surprise, surprise-- is right around the time you left Starfleet. Sound good?"

"Your detective work is well-done, but a bit pointless. It's no secret that I left Starfleet for mental problems3/4 I would hardly have told you of my suicide attempt if I wished to hide that from you. You could have asked."

"Oh, really. Let me ask, then. Why did you leave Starfleet?"

"Mental instability. As I think you just found out."

"No, no, no. Not a catch-all phrase. What did you _do_? Tell your commanding officer that gremlins were conspiring to destroy the ship? Run down the corridors nude? Kill someone?"

It took all of her Vulcan control to keep from reacting to the last. "Nothing as obvious as that. I was... unstable. My control over my emotions was gone. I needed to return to Vulcan to relearn the disciplines. As you can see, I was successful."

"Not that successful. Who did you kill?"

The human-normal environments aboard most Starfleet facilities were cold and made Vulcans somewhat lightheaded anyway, from the lower gravity. But T'Laren had grown up on Earth and never felt it before. Now all of a sudden the starbase was very, very cold, and she felt as if she might float away. Oh, he was good at this. He knew no practical way to make people like him, but he could see through defenses as if they weren't there. Perhaps the Empress should consider getting new clothes, T'Laren thought, and forced composure. "Myself," she said softly. "But that was after I had already returned to Vulcan. I wasn't discharged for a suicide attempt." She would not tell him about Soram. Half-truths, outright lies if necessary, but she _would_ not tell Q, of all people, of her shame.

"And you're supposedly all better now?"

"In all the senses that matter, yes." She sat down next to the bed. "You saw that I am... still sensitive over some parts of it. My control is far from perfect there. But I am not dangerous to myself or any other, I am in full control of my actions, and I act on logic, not on what I may feel. Because I do feel. I grew up without the disciplines, and I may never master them fully. I have emotions. But I choose to ignore them when they are irrelevant, which is most of the time."

"Wait, are those violins I hear playing in the background?"

Now she was on somewhat more familiar territory. Q's insults couldn't hurt her; it was his insights she feared. "Does that answer all of your concerns?"

"Far from it. You see, I also went looking for your orders." He glanced at the computer again. "Something you have to realize is that, to amuse myself, I have been teaching myself your Federation computer system, and its security, and how to bypass it, for the past three years. Considering my intelligence and affinity for this sort of thing, it's a measure of quite how good Starfleet security systems are that I can't get at high-security classified material. But I can access about what a lieutenant commander in Starfleet without a pressing need to know could get at, which covers most things. And I can't find your orders anywhere. Which means one of two things." He looked at her with a hard expression. "If you truly had orders from Starfleet to help and heal me and all such wonderfulness, they would not be classified beyond my reach. So either you don't have any orders, or your orders say something else."

"I'm a civilian. I wouldn't have orders."

"Your authorization, then. Whatever it is Starfleet hired you to do, it would be in the records here unless it didn't exist or was classified. I find it hard to believe that Anderson would simply take your word for it, so I'm inclined to believe the latter, but then you're a Vulcan and a former Starfleet officer and people would be inclined to trust you."

"And you conclude from all this?"

"Well, there are several possibilities." He studied her intently as he spoke. "Number one. You're an alien shapechanger posing as the Vulcan psychologist T'Laren. You've come to try to lure me away from the safety of the starbase, where you can dispose of me at leisure. Two, you are T'Laren, but you've been hired to do what I just said. Three, you are T'Laren, you're insane, and you think you have orders from Starfleet for whatever demented reason. Probably you also think you have a fast ship, too. If I go with you, I'll find myself out in the middle of nowhere with inadequate protection. Four, Starfleet hired you for some sinister purpose that they don't want to risk my finding out, so they classified your orders. Perhaps you're to perform psychological experiments on me or something. In any case, if any of these are true I'd be foolish to go with you. I have every intention of dying soon, but I'd like it to be quickly, cleanly and by my own hand. I have no desire to be handed over to some unfriendly species to be tortured to death."

"My orders were given to me in person. It's entirely possible that the requisition from Starfleet hasn't arrived yet; however, I do have Starfleet priority codes."

"Which can be faked."

"As can orders."

Q shook his head. "Try it on someone a bit more naive. You convince me that you're not an agent for some hostile power, not insane, and not lying about your orders, and I _may_ go with you. Right now, though, I am sufficiently unconvinced that I'm tempted to call security on you and have you questioned." He looked up at her with narrowed eyes. "So. Convince me."

T'Laren considered. Lhoviri had warned her to avoid telling Q the truth for as long as she could... but it seemed there was no longer an alternative. "If you don't believe the half-truths I've been giving you, there's little chance you'll believe the whole truth," she said.

"Try me."

"Very well. When I told you where I got _Ketaya_, nothing but the name of the race that my benefactor belonged to was an actual untruth. If I had told you the name of that race, I suspect you would recognize it," she said dryly.

"Fine, then. Who _are_ these marvelous aliens that give out spaceships for services rendered?"

"The Q Continuum," T'Laren told him.

Q's mouth opened and closed. No sound came out of the speaker.

Somewhat amused, T'Laren continued. "To be precise, I was approached by an individual I call Lhoviri, eight months ago. 'Approached' is perhaps the wrong term; he imposed his presence on me and dramatically interfered with my life. At the time I was not pleased. Once he'd persuaded me to listen to him, he requested my services for his, quote, 'little brother', explaining your situation. I was offered as payment... something I could not refuse. The details are somewhat personal. Suffice it to say that he saved my life, and helped me to regain my sanity. _Ketaya_ was given me to help protect you; it isn't actually payment."

"Then you lied when you said Starfleet sent you," Q said, regaining some of his composure.

"No, actually. You asked me who hired me, and I said that Starfleet had grown concerned for your welfare. Which was true. Lhoviri told me he would arrange for me to receive orders from Starfleet, but if they're not in the computer perhaps he hasn't gotten around to it yet."

"You're right. I'm not at all sure that I do believe you."

"Why not?"

"Because it's too perfect." His face twisted bitterly. "Essentially you're telling me that the Q Continuum hasn't forgotten about me. That I'm important enough to them that they'd hire a mortal psychiatrist for me. Which is something that, for obvious reasons, I'd very much like to believe, and I'm always very suspicious when someone tells me something I'd like to believe."

"What _can_ I say that would convince you?"

"I don't know." He shrugged slightly. "This Q you call Lhoviri, what did he look like?"

T'Laren frowned. "Why does that matter?"

"It does. Trust me. Did he appear to you as a Vulcan?"

"No. A human male, blond, of medium build, with a slightly chubby face--"

"Talks with his hands?"

"Yes."

"I know him," Q said grimly. "All right. Now I believe you."

"How can you know him by a physical description? I was told your people could appear as anything they wished."

"We can. But within a certain species, we almost always take a certain form, and no one else is allowed to use it. The form you describe... is the human form reserved by the guy that got me thrown out of the Continuum." He shook his head. "If any of them would be watching me, he would."

"You don't sound particularly happy about it."

"I'm not. This adds a new dimension to the problem. You've almost managed to convince me that _you_ are sincere. The question is, is Lhoviri?"

"I'm not sure I follow. He's your own kind. He hired me to help you--"

"So he said. But you see, once again we have different possibilities. It could be that Lhoviri feels somewhat responsible for me, being the author of my current predicament, and in his omniscient wisdom genuinely feels that you can help me. Or it may be that Lhoviri, who got me thrown out of the Continuum and has entertained himself since by watching my suffering, is planning a further turn of the screw. There isn't much lower than this that I can go, after all. He may be planning to let you build me back up again just so he can delight in crushing me even more utterly. And I have no way to know which."

"You must know him fairly well. You've spent millions of years with him--"

"This is how well I know him. I thought he was one of the few members of the Continuum on my side. It was a unanimous decision to exile me, of course, but reasons varied from individual to individual. Some viewed it as my just desserts, others as getting me out of their hair, and still others as a learning experience that would be good for me. Some would be more willing than others to see me come back. I thought Lhoviri was one of my champions, one who would argue after I was gone that the Continuum should relent and forgive me. Instead, I found out that he was the one who _proposed_ that I be thrown out."

The speaker didn't render intonation very well. Even still, T'Laren could hear a wealth of bitter resentment and bewildered pain in Q's speech. "That must have hurt a great deal," she said gently.

"Oh, I'm not talking about how much it hurt. I'm used to betrayal by now, I don't even think about it much. But now I have to consider his motives. Because I know now I don't know him at all, I never did. And I'm a mortal. There's no way I can outthink a Q." He frowned. "Which answers my question, come to think of it."

"Answers your question? In what way?"

"I _can't_ outthink a Q. If Lhoviri wants me to go with you, I'm going to end up doing it anyway whether I like it or not. My gods have spoken, I must obey." He sighed dramatically. "So I suppose I'm going with you."

"Q, I wanted you to come because you believe I can help you, not because you think you're being forced into it."

"Which is why you didn't want to tell me about this charming development?"

"Yes."

He shook his head. "_If_ Lhoviri has my best interests in mind, you probably _can_ help me. He'd know better than any mortal could. And if he doesn't... what can I do? They're omnipotent, and they're my family, and they're my only hope. I've got to do what they say, whatever it costs. So..." he shrugged. "I'll try to convince myself that Lhoviri means well. What's it mean, by the way? Is it Vulcan?"

"The name Lhoviri? It's a god, from pre-Reform mythology. Lhoviri was a god of gifts, but... questionable ones. The personification of the human adage, 'Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it.' The wishes and gifts Lhoviri granted could backfire very badly on the recipient if the recipient wasn't very careful."

Q grinned. "Good name. I'll have to remember it. I'm rather fond of trickster archetypes myself."

T'Laren nodded. "Apparently Lhoviri-- the myth, I mean-- survives in cautionary tales told to children beneath the age of logic. I found out about him by reading books of Vulcan myths, when I was a child on Earth searching for my roots. _Ketaya_, by the way, is also named after a trickster archetype. The name translates vaguely as 'raven'-- a trickster bird associated with death and transformation." She stood up. "Q, I don't know what Lhoviri's motives are. As should be obvious from the name I've given him, I don't trust him any more than you do. But he hired me to protect you and help you adjust to being human, and whatever his real purpose, that is what I'm going to do if it kills me. As far as I can, I'll protect you from whatever he has planned."

Q looked up at her seriously. "Thanks for the offer... but T'Laren, you _can't_ protect me. He's omnipotent. If he wants to get me, he will." He shrugged again. "I'll just have to assume the best. Which doesn't come easily to me, you know; I'm far too cynical. But..."

"But?"

"Well, if he's out to get me, I still couldn't sink much lower than I am right now. And if he's not... maybe this is what he wants me to do to get my powers back. Maybe that's what it'll take. So... all right. When do we leave?"

"As soon as Li lets you out of bed," T'Laren said.

* * *

It wasn't quite that simple, of course. Q was out of bed and walking-- and complaining about it loudly-- for short periods before four days were out. But Li wouldn't certify him well enough to leave the resources of Sickbay and _stay_ out of bed for another ten days. T'Laren showed up for a few hours each day to talk to Q. By the time he was ready to leave, he had begun to look forward to the trip. T'Laren had demonstrated that she was an entertaining conversational partner, if a bit dangerously insightful, and she actually seemed to care about him somewhat, without being sappy like Medellin. Or secretly despising him and trying unsuccessfully to hide it, also like Medellin. If T'Laren despised him, she hid it with the skill of Vulcan discipline; but he didn't think she did, as he doubted a Vulcan could fake the subtle signs he was registering that she did, in fact, give a damn about him personally. He had come to the tentative conclusion that for now, at least, he could trust her.

So he had begun to let himself hope again, and with hope came a certain lifting of the numbness. When Commodore Anderson came to say goodbye, on the day he was to leave, he found to his surprise that he was glad she'd thought to do it.

"I can't say I'll particularly miss you," she said, "and I doubt you'll much miss me. But for what it's worth... I haven't enjoyed seeing you in this much pain, and I hope that you manage to find whatever happiness you can out of life. If for no other reason than that you're a lot less obnoxious that way."

Q grinned. "I love you too, Eleanor."

"I wouldn't go _that_ far."

"Neither would I." He sobered. "For whatever _this_ is worth... I realize I haven't exactly been the most pleasant of guests to have around. Undoubtedly _you'll_ be a lot happier with me gone. And I can't say I've enjoyed myself here, but... I do know that isn't really your fault. And I am sorry. More or less." He smiled again, caustically. "Which doesn't mean I'd do any of it differently, mind you."

"No, of course not." She shook her head. "Get up to your damned ship and off my starbase, Q."

"Without saying goodbye to all my friends? What do you think I am?"

Anderson snorted. "Seriously," Q said, "I'm stuck here for at least another hour or so. Dr. Li wants me back in the torture chamber. Something about a last-minute examination to make sure I don't collapse on my way to the ship."

"You'd better get going, then."

Medellin came by an hour later, right after Li had finished. Q sighed inwardly. Now _she_ was going to be maudlin, count on it.

She didn't disappoint him. "I'm sorry your time here has been so awful," she said. "And I'm sorry I couldn't do more for you."

"I'm sorry too," Q said blandly.

Medellin blinked. "For what?"

"That you couldn't do more for me."

Medellin opened her mouth and closed it resolutely without saying anything. She took a deep breath. "You have to keep doing this?" she asked. "On your last day here?"

"What do you want? Me to forgive you for being a terrible counselor? Fine, I forgive you. It's not your fault you're so inept."

"Now that's exactly the sort of thing that you should work on," Medellin said in a forcedly calm voice. "I'm trying to apologize. You could be gracious about it."

"I could be," Q agreed, "but I'm not. Okay, I take it back. You're not completely inept. You're just completely inept at dealing with me. Probably because you despise me. Am I right?"

For the first time in three years, Medellin finally lost her temper-- perhaps because she was no longer his counselor, and no longer had to be nice to him. "Why shouldn't I despise you?" she exploded. "All I'm doing is trying to help you, and you just keep attacking me and attacking me! What's there to _like_ about someone who does that? How could you possibly expect me to help you when you keep saying things like that?"

Q smiled broadly. "Oh, Nian, you don't know how I've wanted to hear that from you," he said happily. "You should get angry more often, you know. People would respect you more."

Medellin blinked. "You--"

"Thanks for trying to help," he said, with genuine sincerity. "I really do forgive you for everything-- you did at least try, which is more than most of them did. And try not to be so easily intimidated. Get some backbone and maybe you'll get onto a real starship someday."

Because he knew it would confuse her utterly, he hugged her briefly. Then he left for the docking area and _Ketaya_, whistling. Someday Medellin might figure it out.

* * *

T'Laren met him at the airlock. "You have everything?"

"I left most of my antiques to whoever wants them," he said. "I don't think I'll need them anymore. Everything else should've been brought aboard some time ago."

"It was." She extended a hand to him. The brief walk had tired him, and he was glad for the support. "Let's get going, then."


	2. Ketaya

About an hour and a half after they were under way, Q came up from engineering, where he'd spent the entire time since he'd dropped off his bag in his room, onto the bridge. "This is incredible," he said. "Have you any idea what sort of drive you have?"

"One that goes very fast, I'm told," T'Laren said. She found it vaguely amusing that the first thing Q'd done was to examine the engines-- both her father and Soram had been engineers, and it struck her as a particularly male thing to do.

"'One that goes very fast.' Toys in the hands of children." He paced around the bridge. "Your ship has a _transwarp engine_, my dear. Have you any _idea_ how fast that goes?"

"Lhoviri said it would do warp-equivalent 13. Federation starships can't go higher than 10."

"No one using warp can go higher than 10, T'Laren-- it's a physical impossibility. Do you know what he's _done_?"

It was somewhat hard to tell whether Q was agitated or excited. "Who? Lhoviri?"

"He's taken a Thetaran drive and jury-rigged it to work in an obsolete Federation _luxury_ yacht, is what he's done. This is just unbelievable!"

"Why is it unbelievable?" T'Laren gave up on trying to keep her eyes on the console, and swiveled to follow Q with her eyes as he paced. "And what's a Thetaran drive?"

"The Thetarans were the dominant spacefaring race of a conglomerate much like your Federation, about... oh, two thousand years ago, I'd say. At least, that was their peak. They lived out in what you call the Beta Quadrant, deep in unexplored space, and they had a highly advanced technology in comparison to the Federation's, though in real terms they weren't actually any more advanced than, say Vulcans. Lhoviri's taken one of their drives and dropped it into this boat, rather like putting a modern antigrav unit into the body of a 20th-century antique automobile. He's jury-rigged the connections so it'll run off dilithium crystals-- have you tried to use the transwarp drive yet?"

"There didn't seem to be a need."

"Well, there's no way it'll sustain any power over time. Dilithium crystals simply can't handle transwarp stresses. If we try to _use_ our superior speed for any length of time, bang, our crystals are gone." He made an explosion gesture. "The Thetarans used six-dimensional helical matrix crystals. Dilithium's only a fourth-dimensional transverse helix. There's no way our dilithium crystals can maintain the transwarp field without subspace resonances tearing them apart. Did I ever mention that Lhoviri's an idiot?"

"Does this mean we can't use the transwarp drive?"

"Without transwarp, dear doctor, this cattle boat can only do 9.6. Not bad, mind you, but not good enough. And yes, we can use transwarp, if we want to risk blowing our crystals-- and he's tied the crystals into the secondary power net, which means we could risk losing _all_ power, drifting in space-- we have any spare dilithium on board?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"Get some." He sighed. "I can rig a circuit breaker so the crystals don't blow, at least. They'll shatter under the stress, but that's an improvement over an explosion. I just don't know why he had to do it like this. Why not set up a permanent negative inertial field around the engines and put an ordinary warp core in? It would have been so much simpler."

"Could you do that?" Whatever it was. T'Laren wondered if Q realized quite how far the technobabble was going over her head. What was a fourth-dimensional transverse helix, anyway?

Q laughed unpleasantly. "Not for the past three years," he said. "What I'm talking about is what we in the business technically refer to as throwing the laws of physics out the window."

"If Lhoviri did something that broke the laws of physics, wouldn't he have to expend power-- or at least concentration-- to maintain it?"

"No, no. I'm talking about setting up a mild singularity-- a permanent negative inertial field, decreasing our effective mass, which would conversely increase our potential speed. We'd still hit the warp 10 barrier, but if you can do 9.999, no one in this sector of space will be catching you anytime soon. Or he could have set up a transwarp conduit generation matrix, or-- You're not following any of this, are you?"

"I'm no engineer."

"All right. The take-home lesson, in very simple terms, is that Lhoviri's an idiot and his non-intervention policy could get us both killed, unless either I iron the bugs out of dilithium replication or we stock up somewhere." Q ran out of breath and sank down in a chair, looking suddenly exhausted, and rather surprised. "That was fast."

"Are you all right?"

He frowned, seeming to think about it. "No... I don't think so," he said. "Let's see... how quickly I get my breath back... and I'll tell you."

T'Laren got up and went over to him. "You've been pushing yourself too hard," she said severely. "You know you're not well yet. You should have been resting, not wandering all over our engine room for an hour and a half."

"I'm resting now." He lay his head back against the chair, closed his eyes, and took a few deep breaths. "I hate this."

"Your weakness, you mean."

"Yes." Q opened his eyes and glared at her. "And no snide comments about how it's all my fault. I'm well aware it's my fault, thank you."

"I'm not in the habit of making snide comments," T'Laren said. She decided to change the subject. "Now that you're here, perhaps we can discuss our itinerary. Where would you like to go?"

"I don't know. Where is there?"

"I had a few different places in mind." She called the choices up on the computer, more for his sake as she remembered them perfectly well. "The Federation Archeological Society is having its annual conference in three weeks. This year the conference is on Chatimore Prime in the Eyrie system. One of the main topics of discussion: did the Chatimari evolve from the Eyrians of Eyrie 2, 3 and 5, or did they evolve independently?"

"They evolved independently. Actually they were dumped there by the Preservers. But they're no relation to the Eyrians; they just look that way because of interbreeding."

T'Laren looked at him, trying to determine if he were serious or not. "I don't need to know the answer. I merely wanted to know if you wish to attend the conference."

"It'll probably be mind-numbingly dull. Who'll be there? Is Picard going to-- damn." Q fell silent for a moment. He stared into nothing with a look that might have been anger, or grief. "I keep forgetting."

He showed every sign of becoming lost in introspective pain. T'Laren handed him a datapad with the list of names on it. "Q. Here's a list of the attendees."

Q blinked and took the pad from her, shaking himself out of the incipient depression. "Right." He studied the pad. "Dull, dull, dull. I don't know any of these people. I suppose it might be entertaining to crash the conference and shoot down all their ridiculous theories, but there has to be more to life than that. What else is there?"

"There's the wormhole near Bajor, the one that opens up on the Gamma Quadrant."

"Hmm." Q considered that. "The Gamma Quadrant is an entertaining place, but only if you've got a year or more to spend there, even if your starship _can_ go warp 13. And I'm not sure I want to spend that much time away from civilization."

"The Gamma Quadrant is uncivilized?"

"You know what I mean. It's dangerous for me to be that far away from anyone who would be sympathetic to me. The entire universe of people I once wronged seem to know who I am, but none of the entities I ever helped out apparently remember me."

"Did you ever help anyone out?"

"How sharper than a serpent's tooth is a suspicious Vulcan," Q said, pressing his hands to his chest in a melodramatic gesture. "You hurt me, T'Laren, you really do. Of course I helped people... not that most of them realized what I was doing at the time. In fact, a large number of the people who want me dead are people I helped. Not everyone has the perspective to understand what's good for them."

T'Laren had her own theories on that, but she let it pass. "The third possibility I'd thought of was the singularity in the Abister system. They're apparently holding an open physics conference regarding it aboard the _Yamato_\-- luminaries from all over have been invited, not just members of the Federation."

"Refresh my memory. What is this singularity?"

"No one knows. The _Yamato_ was stationed there, studying it, for six weeks, and couldn't figure out what's causing it, so Starfleet's decided to host a physics conference. Singularities aren't supposed to simply come into existence for no apparent reason, as I understand it, and it seems that this may pose a threat of some kind."

"Let me see the guest list."

She handed it to him. He scanned it with evident glee. "Daedalus!"

"Who?" There was no 'Daedalus' on the guest list.

"Dr. Peter Markow. I know him. And a Klingon-- ooh, the redoubtable Dr. Morakh. Now this I've got to see." He frowned at the final entry. "Who's this Professor Yalit?"

"It says she's an associate professor at the Makropyrios."

"I am well aware of what it says, T'Laren. I can indeed read most Federation scripts. I thought I knew everyone associated with the Makropyrios-- it's the most prestigious physics institute in the Federation, and a good number of its graduates and professorial staff have ended up on my doorstep." He scrutinized the datapad. "This says associate professor."

"Yes. I can read as well, Q."

"Associate means she doesn't work there, though she might have once and she almost certainly graduated the place. Let's see her bio." He called up the biographical notes. These were painfully brief-- Yalit had graduated the Makropyrios 56 years ago, with honors, worked there as a lecturer for ten years, and then left for parts unknown. A publication list was appended, but with no sourcepoint for her manuscripts. "I don't believe it. They don't even list her _species_ here! What is she, a Romulan?"

"That would be listed. And Yalit isn't a Romulan name."

"I've never heard of this woman. Well." Q put down the datapad. "It seems we're going to the conference on the _Yamato_, then. What's our ETA?"

T'Laren did some quick calculations. "At warp 6, three weeks."

"Warp _6_? This ship can do warp-equivalent _13_ and you want to tootle along at _6_?"

"You just told me that traveling at transwarp speeds can damage our power supply. Unless it's necessary, I'd prefer not to risk it. The conference doesn't actually begin for 18 days-- and you need the time to recuperate. If spending an hour and a half on your feet exhausts you, you would never make it through a two-week conference."

"I suppose you have a point." He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes again, smiling. "It's difficult to be annoying when one has to sit down and shut up every fifteen minutes or so."

"If I were you, I would find something to take pride in other than my prowess at being annoying."

"Like what?" Q opened his eyes. "My good looks? My charm? My usefulness to the universe? Let's face it, T'Laren, I'm a luxury. I'm sure the Federation would like to keep me around, but they don't _need_ me. No one needs me. No one's needed me since the Borg were defeated. Which leaves me exactly two things that I'm good at: I'm very smart, and I'm very annoying." He shrugged. "One needs to make the most of one's assets."

"Making the most of one's deficits, however, is not generally a useful policy."

"There you go again, expecting me to be logical. Of course it's not a useful policy. Very little of what I've done for the past three years has been useful."

He was trying to provoke a pointless argument. "Why don't I walk you back to your room?" T'Laren asked. "I can show you around _Ketaya_ on the way."

"Did you ever notice how often you change the subject when you're talking to me?" Q asked.

"Did you ever notice how often you continue to discuss a subject after you have nothing more to say?" T'Laren replied.

Q's eyebrows went up. "Oh, good. Very good," he said, nodding slowly. "Very well, T'Laren. Let's go exploring." He stood up and headed for the back of the bridge. "What's behind this door?"

"My quarters," T'Laren said, as the door swooshed open and he entered.

She followed close behind. Q was standing in the middle of her study/living room, looking around. "The privileges of command," he said. "This is certainly bigger than _my_ quarters."

"The captain's quarters is the largest living suite on the ship," she said. "Then come the passenger suites, where you are, and then the crew suites, which are rather tiny, comparatively."

He wandered into her bedroom. T'Laren considered telling him that that was extremely rude, and decided against it. In his current mood, that was no doubt the effect he was aiming for. "How long have you been living here?" he asked.

"Four months."

"No decorations, no pictures of the folks back home... Not even an obscure Vulcan musical instrument to liven up the decor. Are all the rooms you've lived in this devoid of personality, or is it something new you're experimenting with?"

That hit a nerve. T'Laren remembered telling Anderson that Q could not offend her unless she chose to be offended, and concentrated on the disciplines. "They've all been this way," she said dryly. "It's a Vulcan meditative discipline."

"Really." He stepped out of the bedroom. "I think you're attempting humor."

"If I told you that I found your behavior immensely offensive and demanded that you stop, would that satisfy you?" T'Laren asked calmly. "Would you stop probing for weaknesses and behave like a rational human being? Or will you insist on playing these games for a few more hours?"

Q blinked at her. "Do you always do that?"

"What?"

"Ask questions based on a conversation's meta-structure. Normal people don't do that. I think you've been a psychologist too long."

"Occasionally it helps," she said.

"_Do_ you find my behavior immensely offensive and want to demand that I stop?"

"Undoubtedly if I said 'yes', you would say 'good', and continue as you've been doing."

"I take it that means 'yes, but I'm not going to tell you so.'"

"You would take it incorrectly. I am aware that your intention is that I be offended. For the sake of teaching you to stop behaving offensively, I had considered explaining to you why your behavior is unacceptable. I think you know why your behavior is unacceptable, however, and right now perhaps it would be more valuable to teach you that you cannot offend me."

"Will you _stop doing that!_" Q exploded. "Every time I say something you answer as if you're writing a paper on the behavior of Q! Stop analyzing me!"

T'Laren raised an eyebrow in an almost-smiling gesture. "It seems I've found something that offends _you_ first," she said.

"What, is this a contest?"

"That's your decision. Do you want this to be a contest?"

He took a deep breath. "No-I-do-not-want-this-to-be-a-contest," he snapped back at her on one exhalation, and ran out of air, gasping at the end. "All right. You win. You can do the metalevels thing as well as I can, you can treat me like an object for study well enough to _really_ get on my nerves, I concede. You can beat me in a conversational battle anytime I'm depressed, exhausted and half-dead. I bow to my better. What do you want me to do?"

She doubted the games were over-- games were far too integral a part of the way Q dealt with people-- but the fact that she'd gotten him to admit they were there and agree to stop them was a good first step. "I would like for you to let me walk you back to your room, as you're tired and irritable and could use a rest. On the way I could show you around the ship, or we can wait for another time."

"Fine. Show me around the ship. Whatever."

T'Laren had heard more enthusiastic reactions in her time, but at least he was cooperating.

__

_Ketaya_

_'s body was that of a Tamlin-class luxury yacht, a small ship designed for 2-6 crewmembers and with the ability to carry up to four passengers, more if they roomed together. Tamlin-class ships could be privately owned by wealthy people as their personal transportation, or could be used by a small crew for ferrying passengers on pleasure cruises. As a result, it was slightly schizoid, trying in different locations to be either cozy or luxurious. The observation deck definitely fell on the luxurious side. T'Laren guided Q back onto the bridge and out the door in the front, leading onto the balcony for the forward dining room/observation room. This room spanned three of _Ketaya_'s four decks, occupying almost all of the forward bow, with a curved transparent plasteel surface forming the ceiling and three of the walls, exposing the stars. Right now they were in warp, so the computer-imaging function was in effect, turning the bizarre spacescape of subspace into a normal-looking sea of rapidly moving stars. "This is the main dining room and lounge," T'Laren said. "We're on the Deck 1 balcony." She gestured downward. Below, on Deck 2, were six tables, and the pit on Deck 3 contained a fountain, currently deactivated. "This room is primarily intended for guests aboard a space yacht; I doubt we'll be using it much."_

"Oh, I agree." Q scowled at the starscape. "This is horrendously overdone."

She stepped back onto the bridge and walked around its perimeter. "This is our transport platform, and down this way, as you've already discovered, is engineering." T'Laren stepped on the turbo-platform down to engineering. After a moment, Q joined her.

They descended past engineering on Deck 2 down to Deck 3. "Sickbay's up on Deck 2, along with the crew's quarters, and on Deck 4, on either side of the airlocks, we keep maintenance equipment and supply closets." T'Laren stepped off the platform as it stopped on Deck 3, and Q followed. "This is the passenger level, so most of the facilities are here. Down that way3/4" she pointed toward the back of the ship-- "is the swimming pool, the sauna, and the gym. Right here is the kitchen."

"What's the point to having a kitchen aboard a starship?" Q asked. "Don't tell me you can cook."

T'Laren shrugged. "If you insist," she said. "You've already dumped your bags in your room, so I presume you know where it is. If you'd rather have any of the other rooms for some reason, they're all along this corridor."

"Who created this monstrosity?" Q stopped in the middle of the corridor. "I mean, yes, obviously Lhoviri created it, but was the internal design plan _his_ idea? Or did you make this up?"

"It's a Tamlin-class yacht, with some slight modifications that I assume are to accommodate the drive. I suggested that he use this type of plan-- when I was young, my parents took me on a trip to Vulcan, and we traveled in a Tamlin-class ship. Why?"

"Because it looks like what would happen if you crossed a starfaring home with a pleasure liner, an unaesthetic combination at best. And who designed the decor, and what is their fetish for the color green?"

"I did. I like green. If you would prefer a different decor, by all means design one." She walked to the door of his room and touched the "open" panel, gesturing for him to go into his room.

Q went in and collapsed on his bed. "It is unbelievable how quickly I get tired," he murmured. "I can't even seem to sustain a conversation."

What he meant, T'Laren thought, was that he couldn't seem to sustain a pointless argument, though he was certainly trying his best. "If you want to take a nap, it'll be a few hours before we're having dinner."

"I can't take a nap. I can't sleep without a sedative." He rolled over and stared at her. "What do you mean by a few hours before dinner? Is there some set time during which the replicators produce food, and at no other time can we get a meal?"

"I would like you to eat with me, in the kitchen."

"Why?"

"Eating together is an important social connector for humans."

"It's meaningless to me and you're a Vulcan, so why bother?"

"You're missing the point," T'Laren said sharply. "I'm here to teach you how to make social connections with your own species, not Vulcans. What is meaningless to you is meaningful to others and costs you very little. So you are going to develop the habit of eating with other people."

"And if I refuse?"

"You will get very hungry."

Q sat up. "You'd lock me out of the replicator system?"

"I already have," T'Laren said. "You can't use a replicator without my supervision." At Q's look of outrage, she tilted her head slightly. "Consider, Q. Would I be sensible to let a known suicide risk use a replicator freely?"

Q's eyes narrowed. "Am I confined to my quarters without your supervision too?"

"No."

"But that would be sensible, too. Why would you let a known suicide risk walk around freely? I could find my way back to the airlocks and space myself. Or drown myself in the swimming pool."

"You could," T'Laren said, nodding. Actually he couldn't. There were safety interlocks on the airlocks so they couldn't be opened with a person inside, and the swimming pool would rapidly drain itself if its biosensors sensed a person in danger of drowning in it. But she saw no need to tell him that-- he would interpret it as a challenge and work to get around it, even if he didn't actually plan to kill himself. "I don't think you will, though."

"Then why aren't you letting me use the replicators?" He stood up and walked over to her. "This is some kind of power trip, isn't it. You're as bad as Anderson. You simply want to control my life." Q loomed over T'Laren. "Isn't that it?"

T'Laren craned her head up to look at him and made no move from her position. Her unshakable calm would make him look paranoid, automatically defusing his argument. It was a useful technique. "You have twice attempted to kill yourself on what appeared to be a momentary impulse. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems as if your first two suicide attempts were not planned in advance. At some moment, it suddenly struck you that your life was unbearable, and you took the first opportunity at hand to correct the situation. Am I right?"

"The third time was planned. I planned that for a month."

T'Laren nodded. "The third time was also far more serious. I think you gave a lot of thought to your decision, and tried to find some other solution. It was less that you wanted to die than that you thought death was the only alternative to your pain. I have presented you with another possible alternative, and I believe you want to try to make this work. You would rather be happy than dead, am I correct?"

Q stepped back from her with a snort of contempt. "Of _course_ I'd rather be happy than dead. Anyone would. What kind of a stupid question is that?"

"And you are an intelligent man, and aware that if this solution is to work, it'll take some time to take effect. You will give me at least a month or two to prove that you can be happy before deciding that this is hopeless and the best solution is still death. Yes?"

"Thank you for putting words in my mouth."

"Am I right?"

Q glared. "Yes, yes. You're right, you're perfectly correct, you're practically omniscient, now get to the point!"

"I don't need to protect you from planned suicides, Q. For a while, at least, you won't plan your own death-- you'll give me some leeway to try to help you. What I need to protect you from is a sudden overwhelming surge of despair that drowns out your reason. I am afraid that if you had a close, convenient, painless method of suicide at hand-- as you would, if you had access to the replicators-- you might be possessed by a sudden desperate desire for oblivion and act on it. If it took a few minutes to arrange your own death, you would have time to reconsider and let your reason reassert itself." She walked over to him, took his hand, and guided him gently over to his bed. "And whether you want to admit it or not, you're glad I took the precaution. You know you cannot entirely trust yourself, and you're glad that someone is thinking of how to catch you if you falter."

He looked as if he would argue with her for a moment. Then he sat down on the bed, resigned and exhausted-looking. "I suppose you're right," he whispered, almost silently-- it might have been inaudible to a human. He looked up at her. "You win. Call me when you want to have dinner-- I'll be unpacking, or resting, or something."

"You should sleep. You look exhausted."

"I am exhausted, but that doesn't mean I'd be able to sleep. My mind isn't tired, just this feeble shell it's trapped in. I'll be all right if I simply rest for an hour or two."

"All right then." She suspected he'd fall asleep anyway, but it wasn't worth pressing the point. "I'll get you for dinner in a few hours."

* * *

To her surprise, he was not asleep when she came to get him. He was sitting on the floor with the replicator partially disassembled around him, scowling intently at it. "Excuse me," T'Laren said. "What _are_ you doing?"

Q looked up at her and grinned embarrassedly. "Oh, hello, T'Laren."

"Am I to take it that you're doing something I would disapprove of?"

"I don't believe you ever said I couldn't try to bypass your security lock," he said, the picture of innocence.

T'Laren shook her head slightly. "How long will it take you to put that back together?"

"Two minutes if I give up on the bypass. This is cleverly done. Did Lhoviri set up this security system for you?"

"No. I put it in myself."

"I thought you said you weren't an engineer." He started to replace the pieces he'd removed.

"I'm not. But I used to--" She hesitated, thinking how to phrase this. "On my old ship, the chief engineer was a fellow Vulcan, and at one point he placed a software security lock on the replicator in my quarters. I had a friend bypass it for me. So he put in a hardware lock. In order to get access to my replicator, I studied replicator technology and asked another of the engineers to teach me how to disassemble the lock. In the process, I learned how to assemble one as well, as well as a good deal of other mostly useless information about replicators."

"Why did the chief engineer do that?"

She shrugged slightly. "Probably for the same reason I put the lock on your replicator. He... was aware that I was unwell, though he could not quite identify how. Are you finished?"

"More or less." He stood up. "I really need access to the replicators, T'Laren. You can make up some kind of list of dangerous items you don't want me to have-- you can download the list from Starbase 56 if you want to-- but I've got to have access to the replicators."

"I'll consider it," T'Laren said. "Come on."

* * *

She had thought about cooking a meal for them both, but it seemed like a great deal of effort to go to for someone who was not yet capable of appreciating the gesture, so they both ordered from the kitchen replicator. The kitchen was a small, cozy thing with a table big enough to seat six, two replicators, a full set of cooking equipment, and staples in a stasis cabinet. The supply of staples was low-- T'Laren kept meaning to replicate replacements, and never got around to it. She had three sayings in Vulcan hanging on scrolls in various locations in the kitchen, imitating her mother's habit of putting up homey mottoes without the incredible sappiness of the mottoes her mother had used.

"What's that say?" Q asked, pointing at one.

"Mmm." T'Laren studied it, trying to think how to render it. "It's a poem from a children's story-- a work by T'Neer, the Vulcan equivalent of Lewis Carroll."

"There _is_ a Vulcan equivalent of Lewis Carroll?"

"Not quite, but close. Her work is considered either absurd or disturbing, and usually said to be unsuitable for children, despite which children read all of her books."

"What's it _say_, though?"

"I'm trying to translate... I'll have to render it in prose, I'm no poet. '_"But don't you like my gift?" Lhoviri asked. "This is what you wanted, isn't it? Why, I distinctly recall you asking for this in particular. Don't tell me you don't want it now!" And no one did tell him that. Because there was no one there who could speak anymore._'"

"Oh." Q nodded, grinning. "Your benefactor must find that one vastly entertaining."

"I wouldn't know. He never mentioned it."

"What about that one?" He pointed at another.

"It's a witticism. I'm not sure it would translate well into English."

"Try."

"'Those who spend all their time examining their own logic really ought to have their logic examined.'" At Q's look, she explained, "It's funny in Vulcan."

"I'm sure," Q said blandly.

T'Laren bent over her meal, focused on eating. A minute passed in silence. Finally Q said, "What do people talk about at these things?"

"Generally one avoids talking about anything unpleasant. Aside from that, however, any topic is acceptable." She looked up. "For instance, we could discuss the fact that you are about 20% underweight, have no muscle tone to speak of, and desperately need to build up your strength, and yet you are eating nothing but a small bowl of linguine in butter sauce and a sugary chocolate drink."

Q shrugged. "I wasn't that hungry. Does the replicator know about the supplement I need? Li says I won't be able to digest properly on my own for a few months, I have to have a supplement in my food to help digest it."

"Yes. Do you realize you have no vegetables, no meat, no dairy products-- nothing but starch and sugar and a smattering of fats in the butter sauce? There's not a vitamin to be found in what you're eating."

"I'm sure there's one or two."

"Q, you're badly underweight. You were thin before you destroyed your entire intestinal tract and needed to be placed on life-support for two weeks, and you're close to skeletal now. Eat some meat. Vegetables. Something. That meal would not satisfy _me_, and my ideal weight is half yours."

Q sighed. "I told you, I'm not that hungry. Besides, I thought starch was supposed to be good for gaining weight."

"I thought so too, until I met a man who eats nothing but carbohydrates and looks like he's starving to death." T'Laren's eyes narrowed. "I think this is another of your subconscious self-destruct attempts. Tomorrow you're going on a diet and exercise regimen."

"You want me to _exercise?_ In my condition?" Q stared at her as if she'd just told him to breathe water. "T'Laren, I can't stay on my feet for half an hour without getting winded and you think I should _exercise?_"

"How do you expect to get into better shape?"

"Let my body heal itself. It's good at that. That's what it's evolved for."

"You need to build up muscle and stamina. Your body can't heal itself if you don't give it raw materials to build with, and it'll heal faster if you use it." She shook her head. "That is not a young body, Q. It's by no means an old one, but it's physiologically at least in its 30's. It can't take this kind of abuse."

"It is so a young body. It was in perfect health three years ago. Well, except for a tendency toward a bad back, but aside from that it was in perfect health, and it's only three years old chronologically."

"That doesn't matter. Physiologically it was past its peak when you got it. Why did you choose to be in your 30's? Why not pick, say, 18?"

Q picked at his food. ""If they'd given me time to think, I certainly would have asked for it younger. And with no bad back. And no tendency to hair loss. And while I was at it, I'd have given it an ESP rating considerably higher than human average, built up its muscular structure and increased its senses to human maximum. If I'd had time, I might even have chosen a completely different body. I might have chosen to be female. Women get a lot more sympathy than men, I've noticed." He looked up. "But they didn't give me time.

"I'd taken this body originally for a completely different purpose. I wanted a form specifically designed to be intimidating and challenging on an intellectual and authoritarian level, and I was aiming it at Picard. I chose a male body, younger than Picard but old enough to have some authority, taller and stronger-looking than Picard, because human men instinctively respond to strange human males as potential threats, especially stronger, taller ones closer to their physical peak. This is a subconscious thing, mind you-- most men aren't aware they do it, but they do. They also learn equally subconscious techniques for defusing the threat that they themselves present to other men. Unfortunately, I never bothered to study those techniques when I was a Q, and now I'm stuck. While the body of a challenger is ideal when one intends a challenge, it is a very bad idea when one wants sympathy. As a human, I'd have done a lot better in a weaker-looking body-- as I said, perhaps a female one, perhaps an adolescent one, though adolescents don't get much sympathy either. Alternately, I'd have done better if this body actually was the specimen of physical perfection that it was when I was omnipotent. I didn't check for genetic booby traps back when it was irrelevant to me, and when I said I wanted to be human, they automatically put me in the human form I'd most often manifested in, without giving me time to fix it up."

"Where did you get this form?"

"Stole it. I picked this one up about a hundred years ago. There's a story behind it, but not one I much feel like telling. Suffice it to say that with minor modifications it's genetically identical to a man who died more or less a century ago."

"I thought your first contact with humanity was six years ago."

Q smiled thinly. "I have rather given that impression, haven't I."

"Time travel?"

"Or outright lies. Take your pick. I prefer to be mysterious and secretive, myself." He leaned forward, widening his eyes slightly. "And I don't appear to be alone. Every time you've told me anything about your own background, you've phrased it in as vague terms as possible. Believe me, as a master of vagueness myself, it's an impressive performance. But it does lead me to wonder what you're hiding."

T'Laren frowned. "Hiding? It's less that I'm hiding something than that my life is simply uninteresting."

"Oh, come now. A Vulcan raised in Texas, working as a psychologist, drummed out of Starfleet for mental illness, and you say your background is uninteresting? How can it be anything but interesting?"

Perhaps it was a good thing that he was showing an interest in other people's histories-- it usually did indicate that a person was becoming less self-centered. T'Laren did wish, however, that it wasn't her history in particular that he was interested in. "What do you want to know?"

"To begin with, why Texas? Were your parents diplomats or teachers of some sort? What were they doing on Earth, and more importantly, what were they doing in Texas?"

"They lived there," T'Laren said dryly. "My parents were humans."

Q stared at her for several seconds with a disbelieving expression before the light dawned. "Ah. _Adoptive_ parents. I see."

"Yes. I was adopted by a human couple."

"Why?"

This story was harmless enough, and if she could keep him at the table a while longer, perhaps he would finish his food. T'Laren turned to the replicator, called up rolls and dessert pastries, and put them on the table, hoping that Q would take one to snack on. She then leaned back and began the story.

"My natural mother, T'Lal, was a Starfleet officer. At the appointed time, she took leave on Vulcan--"

"The appointed time?" Q interrupted, picking up a cheese pastry.

"The time of marriage. Most Vulcans are bonded to their mates in childhood, and at the appointed time, they come together on Vulcan. She went to Vulcan and married my biological father, but... something happened, and he died during their first week together."

Q interrupted again with his mouth full. "By hedging about and saying 'something happened', do you mean you don't want to tell me what happened or you don't know?"

"I don't know. My parents didn't know, because T'Lal never told them, and my Vulcan family wouldn't talk about it. It was undoubtedly something too shameful to discuss with a child or with outsiders. This sort of thing occasionally happens in Vulcan marriages; there are a number of possible causes. In any case, she returned to her ship, pregnant with me. At that time, it was Starfleet policy to allow children under five, if the Starfleet parent was custodial or if both parents were in Starfleet. Civilian adult spouses were permitted aboard only if they could perform some useful function, for instance scientists. T'Lal had a close platonic friendship with my father, the chief engineer, and with his wife, a civilian geologist. Starfleet required-- and still does-- that custodial Starfleet parents declare a guardian for their child in the event of their death. Since my natural mother's family was scattered throughout space, and she had no contact with the family of her mate, she asked my father to be my guardian, and he agreed.

"When I was four years old, T'Lal died on an away mission. The Dorsets took me in, and when I turned five my adoptive mother moved to Earth with me, back to the family's estate in Texas. When I was eight, my father was promoted to an administrative job on Earth, supervising the design of new starships. So they raised me together until I was sixteen, at which point my natural father's family tracked me down. They asked for custody of me, on the grounds that I could not possibly be fully exposed to my Vulcan heritage if raised on Earth by human parents, and my parents saw... the logic in that. So I went to Vulcan."

Q frowned. "Wait a minute. You were sixteen? I admit to knowing little about human childhoods, or Vulcan for that matter, but I would think the damage would have been done by that time." _It was_, T'Laren thought, but didn't say. Q continued, "Did you have any say in this? Did they just hand you over, just like that?"

"No. I..." Emotions rose to the surface, emotions she'd long thought she'd eliminated. "You cannot understand what it's like to grow up an alien. To be raised surrounded by people who on a very fundamental level are not like you. I loved my adoptive parents, and I had friends on Earth, and I was happy there. But... Vulcan was my homeworld. I had dreamed about it all my life. I wanted desperately to be a proper Vulcan, to learn the disciplines fully, to be like I imagined my dead mother to be. When my father's cousin Sepat came to claim me, I went with him quite willingly."

"You sound as if you think it was a bad idea."

T'Laren hesitated, studying her hands. "Perhaps it was."

Q leaned forward. "I asked Sekal about the Vulcan disciplines once. He told me that while humans can't learn the disciplines at all, even Vulcans need to start very young, or the attempt to control their emotions leads to instability and insanity." He met her eyes and held them. "Is that what happened to you?"

After a moment T'Laren dropped her gaze again. "I don't know." She looked up. "I wasn't completely undisciplined when I went to Vulcan. Since I was five, I'd been going to a Vulcan tutor every week. He lived in Dallas, about half an hour by maglev from my home, and he taught me the fundamentals. But... Vulcan discipline isn't something you can pick up in two-hour lessons once a week. It's something you have to live. It's reinforced by everyone around you. And in my case, it wasn't."

She picked up one of the rolls and bit into it, continuing as she ate. "My parents wanted to be very supportive. They paid for my lessons, they told me that if I wanted to be Vulcan they were happy with my choice, they got me books on Vulcan and even took me on a few vacations there. But on Vulcan, if a little girl spontaneously throws her arms around her father and hugs him, she is gently reproved for her emotionality. When I did it, my father smiled indulgently and hugged me back. Intellectually they understood that I should achieve emotional control, but... they were only human. When I was properly controlled, they perceived me as being cold to them, and it hurt them. And my friends were far worse. They didn't even make an attempt to make allowances for my being Vulcan-- if I wanted to play with them, I had to act like a human being. So I studied the disciplines, but I didn't use them to master my emotions. I couldn't. There was too much pressure on me to be emotional. Instead, I learned how to hide my emotions if I chose, and how to project different emotions than what I felt. I studied human behavior constantly, obsessively, and I learned to pretend and to lie, to wear a thousand different masks. That isn't Vulcan behavior."

"And trying to imitate real Vulcan behavior drove you nuts?"

"It wasn't that simple."

"T'Laren-- if it was that hard for you to be a Vulcan, why did you even bother? Why didn't you just quit trying?"

That approached territory she definitely did not want to discuss or talk about. "I was under... pressures that you cannot possibly understand. I had to be Vulcan. It was immensely important to me." She thought of how it had been, stretched so thin between Soram's demands that she be a proper Vulcan and her own desperate emotional needs. Her Vulcan act had always been flawed, because it was emotion that drove her to such an act, an emotion so violent and consuming that it had snapped her in the end. If not for Lhoviri, it would have destroyed her.

Actually, it _had_ destroyed her. When Lhoviri had found her, she had been dead.

"T'Laren? Are you all right?"

She came back to the present. "Fine. Just... remembering." She shook her head. "I would really rather discuss something else, Q."

"I think... I can understand how you felt," he said. "Which would be a first, I admit. I don't normally understand anything anyone feels. But... I do know a little bit about what that's like."

"Do you?" she asked. "Did you grow up an alien? Do you know what it's like to finally be part of your own kind, and discover that they are more alien to you than the aliens you were raised among?"

"I didn't grow up an alien," he said. "I grew up as part of something that later decided I was inferior, unsuitable, and threw me out to live among aliens. The situation's not identical, I know. But I can sympathize." He smiled ironically. "In terms of the Q lifespan and our stages of development, I am approximately at the same stage you were when you went to Vulcan. You, at least, chose to go."

"You're sixteen? Approximately?"

Q shrugged. "There's no exact analogy. We measure development by maturity itself, not an artificial indicator like chronological age. And those at my stage of development are considered adults, in the sense that our children don't participate in the Continuum overmind and I do. Did. But as I understand it, the closest human equivalent to my stage of development would be the stage of adolescence, yes. The stage in which one makes the transition from child to mature adult, attempts to find one's place in one's society... and runs the greatest risk of self-destructing, one way or another. That's adolescence, right?"

"Yes."

"Then that's me." He looked down. "I should say, 'was me'. I don't know what I am in human terms, but what I am in Q society, right now, is a failure, an outcast, a lesser being. The great experiment that was me failed. Back to the drawing board."

"The great experiment? Were you-- in some sense designed differently than your fellows?"

"Oh, no, no, no. That's not what I meant." He leaned forward. "Every infant Q created is an experiment. We don't reproduce to replace ourselves-- only our adolescents can possibly die, and that only if the rest of the Q weeds them out. We produce new Q to provide different points of view, new perspectives, to add to the range that the Continuum covers. And if a particular perspective turns out to be not worth the trouble it causes, it gets weeded out in adolescence. Failed experiments, time and effort down the drain. Either a flawed design, or something in the errant entity's life experience, has caused it to become useless or dangerous to the Continuum. So we kill it, or reabsorb it..." He stared down at the table. "Or make it mortal and let it die of natural causes. I'm not the first this has happened to." His voice had a wavering edge to it, and a heavy dose of bitter pain.

"Have any of the others ever been taken back?" T'Laren asked gently.

Q looked up at her, eyes bright with unshed tears. "Not that I can remember," he said, his voice beginning to break.

Then he pushed away from the table and stood, shaking his head violently. "This is stupid. I'm obviously overtired. Can I have my sedative now?"

T'Laren shook her head. "You do look exhausted," she said. "But if you're that tired, you shouldn't need a sedative."

"It doesn't matter how tired I am, I can't sleep without a sedative. Could you just give me one, and save the argument for tomorrow?"

"I don't like you constantly taking sedatives. Your health is poor as it is. It sounds as if you've grown dangerously dependent on them." She stood up. "I think it would be best if we got you off them as soon as possible. I don't want you taking sedatives when you're this weak."

Q stared at her in disbelief. "You're not going to give me a sedative."

"Correct."

"But I _need_ it." He sat down heavily and swallowed. "Do I have to beg?" he asked harshly.

"Explain to me why you need a sedative. What symptoms do you experience that prevent you from sleeping?"

"Well, to begin with, I'm in constant pain." His voice was sharp and challenging. "I told you already, I'm constantly plagued with aches and pains. My neck, my back, my head, my stomach, all hurt all the time. I can ignore them when I'm awake to a small extent, but they take over when I'm trying to sleep. If you won't let me have a sedative, can I have a painkiller?"

"I don't want you dependent on them, either." T'Laren walked around behind him and reached toward his shoulder. Q flinched.

"What are you doing?" he demanded, sounding frightened.

"Checking something." She took his shoulders in each hand and felt for tension with thumbs and fingers. His neck and back were rigid, his muscles like duranium cables. "Try to relax."

"But what are you _doing_?"

"A large part of your pain seems to be coming from tension. Q, I'm not going to hurt you or do anything you'd find unpleasant. Please relax."

He relaxed slightly. She could see it in the set of his shoulders, hear it in the soft release of held breath. But she could barely feel the relaxation at all-- his back muscles were still rigid. His spine was badly out of alignment, the muscles in his back having gradually tugged it into an unnatural configuration.

T'Laren released him and stepped back. "All right. I believe I know how to fix the problem."

"Really." His voice was flat and disbelieving.

"Come with me." She left the kitchen. Q stood up and followed.

"Are we going to sickbay? I don't need an adjustment. I just need a painkiller. Or a sedative. Either would do."

"We're not going to sickbay," she said, and palmed open his suite's door.

"Why are we going to my room?" he asked nervously, following her inside.

"Lie down."

"I-- no." He backed away from her toward the exit. "Tell me what you're going to do."

"I'm going to fix your back so you can sleep. Now lie down."

Q scrutinized her suspiciously. "This doesn't have anything to do with sex, does it?"

T'Laren blinked in surprise before she could control the reaction. Where had he gotten that from? "No. It has nothing to do with sex, I assure you. I'm just going to fix your back."

That seemed to lessen his nervousness, but not eliminate it entirely. He sat down on the bed, but made no move to lie down. "Do I have to take off my shirt?"

The answer, T'Laren suspected, had to be 'no' or he would balk again. "It isn't necessary. It would make things easier, but I can work with your shirt on. And no, you do not need to remove any other articles of clothing either, though I suspect you would be more comfortable with your shipboots off."

Q lay down on his back, making no move to take his boots off. T'Laren wondered why he was so incredibly nervous. Medellin and his file had both said that he was celibate by choice, and that he claimed this was because he considered sex disgusting and beneath him. He had never demonstrated any problem with the relief of pain, however, and there was nothing in his files to indicate a phobia of being touched. Perhaps he'd been reading too many books where a massage led to seduction-- though even then, this wasn't disgust. This was fear. It occurred to T'Laren to wonder if someone had molested him somehow in the past three years-- surely sexuality would not carry sufficient value to members of the Q Continuum that he should be terrified of the possibility.

"You have to turn over," T'Laren said. "I can't reach your back."

He did so. "Are you sure this has nothing to do with sex?" he asked, his voice somewhat muffled against the bed.

"Positive. Backrubs can be used as a form of foreplay or seduction, but by themselves they are completely platonic. I assure you, there is nothing sexual in this. Now relax."

She reached down and found the nexii of tension under the shoulderblades with her fingertips, digging in slowly. Q made a sharp noise, jerked and turned his head with an expression of outrage that quickly faded to puzzlement. "That felt good," he said, surprised.

"It's supposed to. Lie still and let me finish."

He lay his head back down on the bed, pillowing it on his arms. "I've gone to sickbay to have my back fixed in several extreme cases. The remedy usually was almost worse than the problem."

"This is a massage, not a chiropractic adjustment-- although I think you need that, too. Once I've relaxed the muscles, we'll adjust your spine. It only hurt you before because you were too tense." She probed the area around his shoulderblades with slender fingers, varying the pressure as she located the worst points. The tension in the muscles slowly started to ease under her fingers. Q sighed.

"Mm. I thought the only kind of massage that was supposed to feel good was the sexual kind. The other kind was supposed to be painful, or it wasn't a good massage."

"You're talking about rolfing. That's only one school of thought. Most people acknowledge that a therapeutic massage should feel good." She moved up from the shoulderblades to the collar and neck area.

"Ohh. This really feels quite astonishingly good. Where did you learn to _do_ this?"

T'Laren herself relaxed slightly. She enjoyed making people feel good, and it was considerably more pleasant when they acknowledged that it was working, instead of challenging and resisting her. "Part of Vulcan training. In order to properly control our bodies, which is necessary for mastering our emotions, we need a thorough knowledge of our own neuroanatomy. As it happens, Vulcan spinal neuroanatomy is virtually identical to nearly every other humanoid race's. That's why the nerve pinch works; it is actually just a side effect of our training. Only Vulcans in Starfleet and in security positions are really good at it, since we're the only ones who practice it a lot. The same goes for backrubs; while any Vulcan would know the techniques in theory, few have practiced it. Vulcans use self-relaxation techniques instead. I, however, lived among humans, so I ended up practicing a great deal, first on my parents and then my classmates at the Academy."

"Well, you're very good. If you ever decide to quit the psychology business, you have a brilliant future as a chiropractor. Or a masseuse. I'll personally write you a letter of recommendation. Ohh. This is _astonishing_."

He sounded almost dazed, as if he couldn't believe he could possibly feel good. T'Laren wondered how much pain he'd actually been in, and if that could have anything to do with his depression. If he really had been suffering physically for some time, that could well be a component of his desire to escape his life. "I'm glad you find it pleasant," she said, and moved up to the bare skin on the back of his neck. Here she could feel the tension more powerfully than through his clothes, with the distant currents of his mind tantalizing the edge of her consciousness, a faint shadowy wash of pain receding to pleasure. With a small effort, she shielded her mind.

Q suddenly tensed, his head moving up. "You people are touch-telepaths, aren't you."

"We are, but I've shielded my mind against you," she said, wondering why he brought that up now. He couldn't have sensed the brief almost-contact; she had been passively receiving, making no active attempt to link, and Q's ESP rating was no better than human average. He would have had to have been reading her mind to know that she could have opened a link to his, and that was beyond his capabilities now. "Also, unshielded physical contact itself doesn't form a link; an active effort of concentration is needed to open a telepathic channel, preferably at one of the meld points. And if I tried to form a meld, you'd know it. My touching your skin alone doesn't permit me to read your mind, Q." She wasn't going to mention that the back of the neck was a meld point. What he didn't know wouldn't needlessly frighten him.

"Oh." He relaxed. Probably he hadn't noticed anything at all; he was just paranoid about having his mind read. T'Laren imagined she would be in his position, too. To be so immensely powerful on a telepathic scale that others' minds were an open book, and yet they could only sense you at all if you chose; and then to be suddenly stripped of that power, one's mind naked and psionically defenseless... that _would_ be somewhat horrifying.

The brief moment of fear had caused a mild tensing-up all throughout his back again. She moved down from his neck-- he could probably use a temple massage, too, but things like that would have to wait until he was more secure with her telepathy-- and down his back again, finding the muscle clusters and rubbing them into submission. Probably he could use her ministrations on his buttocks and the backs of his legs as well, but that again would have to wait until he was more secure.

"I think I'll teach you some elementary biofeedback and relaxation techniques," she said. "There's no reason you should have to be in such pain."

"Could I learn that?" he asked.

"I don't see why not. Humans have developed relaxation and meditative techniques themselves, so I know there's no biological reason you can't do it. You'd never be able to achieve a Vulcan level of control, but I think you would feel much better about your life if you had any modicum of control over your own body, however small."

"I agree. Ohh. Yes. Right there." He moaned as she pressed her fingers into the small of his back, on either side of his spine. "This is unbelievable. Why don't Starfleet medics learn how to do this?"

"Most of them do, but it's something done for friends, not as a treatment. Starfleet personnel are all trained in some sort of personal relaxation technique, so they don't need this sort of thing as badly as you apparently do, and most of them have friends."

"Really. It never occurred to me that having friends provided any sort of physical benefit. I'd always thought the advantage was mostly emotional."

"Body and mind are linked. You should know that by now."

"Mine aren't."

That was such an outrageous thing to say that T'Laren had to assume he meant it as a joke, though he'd spoken in a perfectly serious tone of voice. She didn't reply directly. "Humans have a deep psychological need for physical contact with their fellows. It's one of the major differences between humans and Vulcans. Vulcans have a deep psychological need for telepathic contact with their fellows, but if that requirement is fulfilled we have no real need to touch each other. Humans, having no telepathy, need physical contact."

"And what if they don't get it?"

"They generally become very unhappy, which has a profound physical effect. Unhappiness can cause tension, stomachaches, headaches and muscle spasms. Over time, it can cause drastic weight loss, accelerate hair loss, and increase the apparent speed of aging."

"Oh, very funny," Q muttered. He turned his head to look up at her. "Are you trying to say that I'm unhappy because I lack physical contact with human beings?"

"Not at all. You are unhappy for multiple and complex reasons, primary among which is the fact that you have been deprived of most of your abilities and exiled to a life you are unsuited for. No one would deny that. But your lack of positive social contact is another of the reasons, exacerbating the problem, and the lack of physical contact is merely a small aspect of the lack of social contact. I doubt having friends could make you happy, but it could make your life bearable enough that you could continue to hold on in hope of reinstatement. And if your life were more bearable, you wouldn't be under so much stress, and so you wouldn't be in so much pain. Doesn't that make sense to you?"

He sighed. "I'd like to argue with you. I hate the idea that I could be so dependent on other people. Bad enough I need them to protect me, I have to have them like me too? But it's far too obvious that-- ohh-- you've just demonstrated that-- put it this way. I have obviously been missing out on something. And if any of this positive social contact nonsense could make me feel half as good as you are doing now, it's definitely something I want to look into. Ohhh. Why didn't anyone ever _tell_ me this was possible?"

T'Laren raised an eyebrow. Medellin had been trying to get the idea that he should try to make friends through his head for three years. Apparently all it would have taken was a skilled backrub. She would have to call Medellin and suggest the technique for future reference. "People told you several times it was possible for you to feel good. You ignored them or dismissed their suggestions as disgusting, unnecessary or impossible."

"You're right," he murmured. "I'm an idiot, T'Laren. But I'm so used to hurting now that if something comes along that sounds like it might be pleasant, I think there has to be a catch somewhere. Or I think about what it's going to end up costing me in the long run. Ohhh. I never thought-- I could get so used to pain-- that its relief would seem so exquisite. I really can't get over how good this feels. I'm trying to remember if I ever felt this kind of pleasure when I was omnipotent, and you know, I must have, but I can't remember a single incident. This is just _unbelievable_."

T'Laren frowned slightly. Backrubs were pleasant, but not _that_ much so. She wondered if Q overreacted to pleasure to the same extent that he did to pain, or if it was because he had been desperately starved for humanoid contact. Or possibly both. He was reacting more like a virgin who had just discovered sex than a man receiving his first massage. On the other hand, if it could get him to freely admit that she was right and he was an idiot, perhaps she should not complain of his overreaction.

She had worked her way back up to his neck by this time, and now slowly started to rub his scalp, running her fingers through his hair as she gradually worked over to his temples. She wanted to see if he was ready to trust her yet. He had to know that the temples were some of the primary meld points; Vulcan mindmelds were featured often enough in fiction and holofilms that she didn't think anyone who read as voraciously as he did could avoid knowing it. But when she reached to rub his temples, cautiously, he didn't jerk or flinch or do anything except lie bonelessly under her hands. At least for now, he seemed to trust her not to invade his mind.

She lifted her hands away from his temples. "I'm going to straighten your spine now," she told him. "It won't hurt, but it will feel a little bit unusual. I don't want you to become afraid or tense up."

"If you wanted to break my neck right now, I'd let you," Q murmured. "Do what you will with me."

T'Laren pressed one hand against the small of his back, held his left shoulder with the other, and pulled. Q released his breath explosively, but made no attempt to resist as she pressed the heels of her palms against his spine, pushing the vertebra into place. She repeated this several times, moving up his back, then took his head in her hands and twisted it hard, straightening the spine in the back of the neck. Then she released him and stroked his back lightly, soothing any residual tension as she checked her work. "You need to increase muscle tone in your back, and to learn some relaxation exercises, for this to be permanent. But for the next day or two, I think your back won't give you any trouble."

"Mmm." He turned his head to face her, a lazy, happy smile on his face. "Thank you. That does feel much better."

T'Laren walked over to the replicator and ordered a cup of hot cocoa for him. "Here. Drink this."

Q sat up, leaning back against pillows that he'd propped against the wall behind his bed, and took the drink. "Not that I'm complaining, but why?"

"Warm drinks have a natural sedative effect. Especially warm drinks with high trypsin levels. This is essentially heated chocolate milk. Humans have used it as a natural sleep aid for centuries."

"What's the difference between a 'natural' sedative and a hypo with a sleep drug in it? It seems like you're somewhat inconsistent. If one kind of sedative is bad, why is another good?"

"Comparative levels and strength. Warm cocoa can't put you to sleep against your will. If you're already relaxed and prepared to go to sleep, however, it can help speed the process. A hypo with a sleep drug in it imposes sleep on you; a warm drink helps your body do the job itself. Besides, it'll help settle your stomach."

"All right." He sipped at the drink. "T'Laren-- thank you. Really. It's amazing how much better I feel now. I don't even have stomach pains, and you didn't do anything to my stomach."

"Everything's interrelated."

Q nodded. He seemed unusually open and suggestible, almost a normal human being in comparison to his usual reflexive stubbornness. "I suppose it must be. I-- thank you. I think maybe I will be able to go to sleep now."

"I'm glad." She turned and walked over to the door, which opened to release her. "Good night, Q."

"Aren't you going to tuck me in?" Q asked.

T'Laren turned back, startled. Q smiled winningly. He really could look boyishly charming if he tried. "After all, I'm onwy fwee."

"I thought you were sixteen."

"That, too."

"If you have your heart set on being tucked in," T'Laren said, one eyebrow raised, "I can arrange to oblige."

Q laughed. "No, no. You've babied me far too much already tonight. I'll get spoiled," he said. He put down the cocoa mug, his expression sobering. "I owe you, T'Laren."

"You don't owe me," T'Laren said. "This is my job. If you prefer, you can consider that Lhoviri has pre-paid your debt in full."

"Then I'd owe _him_, and I'd rather not." He shook his head. "Not that I can avoid it, since all of this is through his doing, but still. I'll find a way to pay you back personally. I promise."

"Try your best to cooperate with me in healing you, and that will be payment enough."

He nodded. "All right. Good night, T'Laren."

"Good night."

* * *

There were monitors in her room, hidden behind paneling, from where she could observe every room of the ship. They had not been part of the original equipment; she had suggested that they would be helpful to have in dealing with a suicide risk who was frequently attacked by various beings, and so Lhoviri had provided them. She was glad, now, that she'd set them up to be hidden unless she asked for them to be displayed; after the story Anderson had told about Q's hunger strike, T'Laren knew that she couldn't under any circumstances let Q know the monitors were there.

She checked the setup. She had programmed the computer to recognize human emotional states to some extent by monitoring the biosensor readings, listening to what people said-- such as "Help" or "Stop", indicating possible need or distress-- and comparing non-verbal vocalizations to a list of parameters to see if particular sounds might be cries of pain, or of fear, or expressions of happiness. The system was not perfect-- she had done extensive testing of similar monitor systems when she was still a ship's counselor, and found that the computer had a fairly high error rate, especially with people as theatrical in their ordinary behavior as Q was. But she wanted to invade his privacy as little as possible, and at the same time needed a system to alert her if he was in trouble or in pain. The computer was programmed to contact her through a stud in her ear, on a frequency inaudible to humans, if it determined that Q was in any sort of distress, and it would automatically display the monitors if she was in her rooms and he wasn't with her.

Everything was working. T'Laren thought of testing the system, and decided against it-- Q might be dressing for bed or something, and while she had no personal taboos against that sort of thing she didn't yet know what might disturb Q. There was conflicting evidence as to whether he had developed a sense of modesty or not. If Q ever did find out she'd been monitoring him, she wanted to be on unshakable moral high ground. So she shut the monitors down and prepared for her nightly meditation.

It was more difficult to achieve trance state than it had been since she'd relearned the disciplines. Insistent thoughts, observations she'd made in the course of the day, plans she had, all intruded and disturbed her concentration. She considered sleeping instead, but rejected the possibility almost out of hand. T'Laren had not experienced uncontrolled sleep since... had it been two years already? Two years since she and Soram had returned to Vulcan, and she had... well, of course she hadn't dreamed since then. Until she'd met Lhoviri, she'd been in no position to dream. And in the time since Lhoviri had come to her-- she thought it'd been about eight months, but time did strange things around Lhoviri-- she had been too busy fighting her way back to a precarious self-control to allow the luxury of dreams. Dreams were entirely too dangerous, their function to bring to the surface things that T'Laren had to repress. The thought intruded that that was a kind of cowardice, but she pushed that thought away too. Few Vulcans allowed uncontrolled dreaming. Meditation was the Vulcan way. She was Vulcan, therefore she would meditate, and there was nothing dishonorable or cowardly about it. So she concentrated on the disciplines, focusing down until all external disturbances vanished and there was nothing but utter peace.

When her internal clock wakened her, five hours later, she felt relaxed, refreshed and completely free of intrusive feelings. She lay on top of her bed, reflecting. It was times like this that made her believe she had, indeed, chosen the correct path in deciding to be Vulcan. She was at such peace that she could not understand why anyone would choose the path of emotions, if given a choice.

Q would still be asleep; most humans slept eight hours or more, and Q had been exhausted. T'Laren dressed and went out to the bridge, where she checked that everything was running smoothly-- of course, the computers would tell her if there was anything wrong, but she felt it illogical to rely on computers too much. Upon determining that there were no problems, she went out onto the observation deck and sat down on the balcony, gazing out at the stars. Soon enough Q would wake up, and she would be plunged back into the stresses of her work. Right now, though, she wished to maintain the peace of her meditation for as long as she could.

A tiny chime in her ear woke her out of her meditation. T'Laren stood up. According to the monitor system, Q was apparently in some distress. She didn't waste time detouring to her room to see what the problem was; instead, she jumped off the balcony and down into the pit, reaching Deck 3 as fast as Earth-normal gravity could carry her, and went directly to Q's quarters.

As she entered his suite, she heard a faint whimper from the bedroom, behind a closed door. There were a number of relatively harmless possibilities-- he could be asleep and having a bad dream, for instance-- but for someone who regularly came under attack by various species with unknown capabilities, there were also a number of genuinely threatening possibilities. T'Laren palmed open the door and went directly in.

The light was on. Q was lying in bed, in black and blue pajamas, curled up tightly and facing the door. He raised his head as she came in, with an expression of outrage and red, swollen eyes. Shiny tracks glittered on his cheeks. "I thought you Vulcans were big on privacy," he snarled. "Don't you _knock_?"

"I'm sorry," T'Laren said, and meant it-- she wouldn't have intruded if she'd thought she had a choice. But she made no move to leave. "I heard you cry out, and I thought you might be under attack of some sort. I would have asked your permission to enter otherwise."

He levered himself up on one elbow, outrage giving way to a horrified disbelief. "You _heard_ that? Through _two doors_?"

"Vulcan hearing is much superior to human," she said. "A human would have heard nothing, I'm sure." She took a step forward. "Q, what's wrong?"

"I'm _fine_," he snapped, but his voice broke, undermining the statement. He sat up, yanking the blankets around him like a kind of cloak. "Fine," he repeated sharply, keeping his voice under slightly better control this time. "It was just a dream."

"It must have been very bad," T'Laren said softly, walking over to a chair by his bed.

Q laughed bitterly. "Oh, no. I'm used to the bad ones. I can handle them by now. It's the good dreams that are killing me." He looked down for a moment, then raised his gaze and glared at her. "It's all your fault. I _told_ you I needed a sedative. I always have dreams unless I take a sedative."

"I don't understand," T'Laren said, sitting down in the chair. "How are the good dreams killing you, Q?"

Q's face twisted with sudden pain. He turned his head away from T'Laren with a sharp shaking gesture and made a sound halfway between an exasperated sigh and a cry of pain. For a moment he seemed to be struggling with his words, or perhaps with his voice. When he finally spoke, it was with the harsh tone of a person using anger to fight off pain. "Every so often I dream that I'm back in the Q Continuum," he said. "It varies, how. Sometimes I dream that my people have taken me back, I'm forgiven, all debts paid. Sometimes I never left at all. All this has been a cruel practical joke a few of my fellows have played on me, and at first I'm outraged, but then I laugh about it with them. Sometimes it turns out that I inflicted this on myself, for some obscure reason that makes perfect sense in the dream, but that my limited mortal mind can no longer comprehend when I wake up. Once, I dreamed that Lhoviri gave me my powers back directly after I tried to sacrifice myself to the Calamarain-- time off for good behavior, I suppose. Whatever, I'm back. I'm myself again." He looked back at her. The anger had faded from his tone, replaced by a desperate longing. "My brothers and sisters have taken me back. I'm immortal again, omnipotent again. All my worries and troubles are gone. My family cares about me. My life is wonderful."

The pain came back to his face as his voice started to crack. "And then I wake up, and it's not true. It's not true. And the disappointment is so incredible that I want to _die_."

"Q--"

She reached for him, but he threw her off. "Don't you understand? It's _never_ going to get any better! They'll never take me back, and I can't bear living like this..." His voice broke completely. "I want to die, T'Laren, I can't stand this anymore. I can't!"

"I thought you were going to try to give this a chance," T'Laren said, still gentle. "I thought you wanted to try to hang on long enough to see if your life would become bearable--"

"It never will!" Q shouted. "I could hold on a year, maybe two, I don't know how many, if I knew they would take me back, but they won't! I'm never going to be part of them again, never..." His breath caught, and he doubled over, unbreathing, for several seconds. When the air finally came out, it was as an agonized sob. He drew his knees up and pressed his face against them. "I can't bear this anymore," he said again, choking it out between strangled sobs. "Please. Help me die..."

T'Laren moved to the bed and put her arm around him. "Q. Listen to me. There's no reason to believe they won't take you back--"

"There's no reason to believe they will, either!" he screamed, his voice raw with hysteria. "If they _cared_ about me, they wouldn't let me suffer like this!"

"You were doing so well before. You were so calm when you went to bed. What happened? Was it just the dream?"

"I was stupid before," Q snarled, lifting his head to look at her. Now his entire face was puffy and tear-stained. "I actually believed you could help me. Stupid, gullible, pathetic _fool!_ Damn Medellin, damn Li, why did they have to save me? Why couldn't they have let me die?"

T'Laren raised an eyebrow. She was beginning to get seriously alarmed. Unless it was normal for Q to go from being upset over a dream to full-blown hysterical despair, there was something very wrong. "Q, we discussed this, remember? There's no reason to think your people won't take you back. It'll just take time. Don't you remember?"

"Oh, I remember. I remember you browbeat me into believing you because I wanted to believe it so much." He turned away from her and put his face against his knees again, muffling his sobs. "Thus proving I'm as pathetically gullible as any other mortal creature, and all my years of experience and wisdom don't mean a damn thing. Biology is destiny, and my destiny is to be worm food. And I'm never going to have anything good in my life again. That business about learning about humanity is crap-- the Q know everything they need to about humanity, they don't need any input from me. There's never been any reason for them to take me back. My people hate me. They want me dead and so do I."

T'Laren was somewhat at a loss. Under similar circumstances with any other patient, she would reassure them that their loved ones cared for them, or that they had great potential in their future. All of Q's potential was behind him in his own view, and he had no loved ones. The closest he came to friends were an android who had no emotions and would probably dislike Q if he did, and a scientist who might or might not have a crush on him and whose name Q barely remembered. Lhoviri had gotten through to her under similar circumstances by pointing out that she could still help people, and thus atone for her own guilt. Q didn't care about such things, though, and appeared to feel less guilty than self-pitying. The only thing she could think of to do at the moment was to put both arms around him and hold him as the spasms of grief racked his body. "Your people don't want you dead," she said softly. "They saved your life. Didn't you realize?"

He looked up at her again. "They did that?"

"Lhoviri made sure you didn't die of your injuries. I think he also sent Counselor Medellin a premonition that you were in trouble."

It seemed to be the wrong thing to say. Q's face twisted up with grief again. "No _wonder_ I couldn't kill myself right!" he screamed. "They won't let me die, will they? They want me to stay alive, and suffer, and suffer..." Abruptly he stood up, tearing free of her, and screamed at the ceiling. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry about Azi, I'm sorry about the Kakkadim, I'm sorry about all of it! Please, stop torturing me like this... take me back or let me go, please, if I can't be with you I want to die..." He folded up and crumpled onto the floor, sobbing hysterically.

His loved ones. Of course. The problem wasn't that Q had no loved ones, it was that the ones he had had rejected him. Immediately T'Laren knew what she had to say. She knelt down on the floor next to him and put her arm around him again. "Q, listen to me. Please. I think there's something you don't understand."

"What?" he asked, a strangled snarl.

"You think your people hate you because they condemned you to this. That they saved your life solely to see you suffer. But don't you realize that they're above that? Why would they let Lhoviri torment you like this?"

"They let me torment Azi," he choked. "If they let me get away with _that_, they'll let anyone do anything to me."

Sometime later, when he was calm, she had to ask him who Azi was. "They did not let you get away with it. Is this letting you get away with it? Isn't that part of what they're punishing you for?"

A complete shot in the dark-- she had no idea if whatever he did to this Azi had anything to do with his punishment. But he stilled slightly under her arm and did not contradict her. "You have done things your people consider wrong, yes," she said. "But you told me before that they could have killed or reabsorbed you--" --and what did it mean to be reabsorbed, anyway?-- "-instead of making you mortal. What advantage does it give them to make you mortal, rather than killing you?"

"It gives them more time to watch me suffer."

"It gives you time to change. Mortality is a death sentence, yes. In Q terms, what's left of your human lifespan is probably only a fraction of an instant. But you live on our terms now, and on our terms you have many long years left. Time in which you can grow and change. Didn't you just say you don't believe they sent you here to learn about humanity?"

"Of course they didn't! They've had three or four of us do it already. They don't need me. They never needed me."

"They do need you," she said softly. "You're part of them. But they need you to change. To grow up. Have you ever heard of the concept 'tough love'?"

"What does some antiquated Earth notion have to do with anything?" he snapped through tears.

"It isn't antiquated. The idea is that if a child-- an adolescent-- is delinquent, or disobedient, and gentler methods of discipline have not worked, it's time for extreme measures. Because if the parent doesn't go to extremes, doesn't hurt the child terribly in order to make him change, the child won't. And he'll grow up to be a delinquent adult, useless to society. Sometimes really stubborn teenagers need to suffer tremendously before they can be salvaged as worthwhile citizens." She leaned down, trying to see his face. "Don't you see the analogy, Q?"

"No."

He was being stubborn-- T'Laren was sure he could see it. "Lhoviri doesn't want you to die, Q," she said. "He saved your life, twice. He hired me to help you-- and I assure you, I don't care how omnipotent he is, he went to a lot of trouble to get me into any kind of shape where I _could_ help you. There are any number of psychologists who could play games with your head to build you back up so he could crush you, as you once accused. Lhoviri wouldn't have needed to trouble himself at all to acquire one. Instead, he put a lot of effort into helping me, so that I could help you. An entity that merely wanted to torment you would not have bothered."

"So what are you saying?" Q asked harshly.

"He _wants_ to take you back. He does care about you. Perhaps he got you kicked out of the Continuum because he thought that was your only hope. Because if you kept going the way you'd been going, you would have reached the point where no change would be possible, and the Continuum would have been forced to kill you. By condemning you to mortality, he's given you one last opportunity to learn, and to mature at a faster rate than you could have otherwise. You're right that the Continuum probably doesn't need to learn what it means to be human, but you do. A large part of what they punished you for seems to be your complete disregard for the lives and rights of mortal beings. If you can learn how to function in a mortal society, they could trust you to be responsible with your powers again, and they could take you back."

"I can't believe that," he whispered.

"Why not?"

"Because I want it to be true, and I never get what I want."

"That's pure irrationality and you know it. I know how much it hurts to trust, Q, but you have to. Lhoviri is not about to let you kill yourself, no matter how much you want to. Your only alternative is to try to do what he sent you here to do, because otherwise you're going to be hopelessly miserable and have no way to escape your misery."

"I can't believe you," Q said desperately. "I _can't_..."

T'Laren had made her point. She said nothing more; simply held him as he wept hysterically. After a minute or two, she got him to ease from the tight, inward-drawn ball he'd curled into and cling to her instead. T'Laren stroked his hair and murmured soothing words, until finally the sobs faded out.

Eventually Q let go of her and turned away, embarrassed. "I-- didn't mean to do that," he said. "That was incredibly idiotic. I apologize."

"What was?"

"Having-- hysterics, like that." He shook his head. "Everything you said was perfectly rational and sensible, and I was reduced to saying 'did not's' and bawling like an infant. Maybe I _am_ a three-year-old at that; I certainly acted like one."

T'Laren disengaged and stood up. "I can certainly understand why your loss of control shames you," she said. "But please keep in mind that I'm used to people doing irrational things that later embarrass them. I would, however, like to figure out why you lost control so quickly and completely. Do you think you can talk about it?"

"Let me wash my face and put some clothes on. I feel ridiculous."

"Very well." T'Laren went out into the living room of the suite and ordered cups of hot chocolate for both of them.

Q came out about ten minutes later, wearing a red jacket over a black jumpsuit that was belted at the waist, and boots with red piping. "More natural sedatives?" he asked. "Or is this part of your insidious plot to fatten me up?"

His tone was actually fairly light-hearted. T'Laren studied his face. It was a bit difficult to tell in this lighting-- Vulcan eyes were not well-adapted to dim yellow lights-- but it looked like he had made himself up to obliterate all traces that he'd been crying, and done so successfully. Since she had first met him lying in a hospital bed, she hadn't seen him wearing makeup before, but it looked skillfully applied-- which meant he wore it fairly often. Possibly for this reason? Men in Starfleet occasionally used basic foundation makeup to make their skin look better, but rarely took it farther than that. Q had gotten rid of the circles under his eyes, the puffiness and red eyes from crying, and had subtracted half a dozen years from his apparent age. That took more skill than most men had. In fact, in this lighting and with her Vulcan eyes, she could only tell he was wearing makeup from the fact that no one who had just been crying hysterically for the past half hour or so could possibly look that good without it.

"It's part of an insidious plot, of course," T'Laren said. "This one simple drink has more calories than you could possibly imagine."

"Than _I_ could possibly imagine?" he asked skeptically.

"Well, your imagination tends toward the grandiose, it's true. Perhaps not." She handed him the cup. "Now. Why don't you sit down, and we'll talk about it?"

"Talk about what?" Q asked, sipping his drink. He wasn't being obviously coy; the question was asked in a sincere tone of voice. T'Laren thought it beyond the realm of possibility that it was a sincere question, but perhaps Q was trying to make her think so.

"Pretending that nothing happened isn't going to change the facts, Q," she said. "I would like to talk about the fact that you broke down seemingly because of no more than a bad dream, despite the fact that you put a high value on remaining in emotional control. Has this happened to you before?"

He frowned at his drink. "Occasionally," he said. "I _am_ sorry-- I really don't know what happened to me. I was-- I was fine when I went to bed, more or less. Actually, after that backrub, I was in better condition than I've been for a long while. Then I had that dream, which woke me up, and I felt like crying. I had it somewhat under control until you came in; somehow then I fell apart. I'm not sure why."

"When has this happened before?"

"Oh... once when I was talking to Sekal. Several times when I wake up in the middle of the night, or when I'm trying to get to sleep. It happened to me almost every night when I thought Security wanted to kill me, but the only person I broke down around then was Lieutenant T'Meth. She's a Vulcan security officer, Sekal's wife--"

"I know. Sekal told me."

"All right. It happened my first night aboard the _Enterprise_ and my first two or three nights aboard Starbase 56, so I'm really not too surprised it's happened now." Q drained his drink and began to study his now-empty mug. "For someone who's spent the past several thousand years as an avatar of change, I seem to handle instability in my mortal existence very badly."

"What exactly happens? Is the intensity of emotion you're experiencing greater than normal, or is it just that you are less able to control the expression of that emotion?"

"I... don't know." He shrugged, playing with the mug. "Maybe both. It happens a lot at night, like I said. Data once told me that human beings are predisposed to getting depressed in the wee hours. Maybe that's part of it. What time is it now?"

"0300 hours. And we're still synchronized to Starbase 56's time, so that's 0300 hours for your cycle as well as mine. That could be part of the explanation, I suppose..."

Q put down the mug. "You sound like you think you know what it is."

"I may know a factor. Or I may be drawing a false analogy. But that sort of sudden and total breakdown over a thing that seems objectively trivial... used to happen to me all the time. It is a symptom of faulty repression. When a person is incapable of actually controlling their emotions, as Vulcans do, but is trying to keep from showing those emotions most if not all of the time, it creates a terrible conflict. This happens to humans who repress their feelings quite a great deal. All it takes is a tiny crack, and the facade breaks completely."

"I know. Vulcans do that when you finally get them mad."

She decided that for the moment she didn't want to know how much Q knew about getting Vulcans mad, or where and when he learned it. "Does that seem to you as if it could be part of your problem?"

"It doesn't much sound like it," Q said. "I don't repress my feelings. You want the entire range of humanity's least pleasant emotions-- anger, fear, despair, pain-- I've got it all. I've never made any attempt to hide what I'm feeling."

"No, not in the usual sense," T'Laren admitted. "But in another sense, you do. There are emotions you dislike acknowledging. You rarely express guilt, or even admit to being wrong. You rarely express a desire for social contact, despite the fact that you obviously need it. In fact, you rarely display any of the social emotions at all. Most of what you show is a reaction to internal circumstances, or a pose adopted to get a reaction from someone else. Would you ever admit that you were lonely and wanted to be with someone?"

"Of course not," Q said. "I'm allergic to getting laughed at."

T'Laren nodded. "In trying to protect yourself from humiliation, you do hide certain emotions. You'd freely admit you were angry-- but not if you were angry at someone for hurting your feelings. Then you would hide your anger with a pose, or give it some rationalization. You admit to fear because you can't help yourself-- if you could keep from showing it, you would. I suspect, in fact, that you would hide as many of your real emotions as possible, and replace them with calculated poses designed to get planned reactions out of people. I suspect that that _is_ what you did for the three years or so of your contact with humanity when you were still omnipotent, and that the only reason you don't still do it is that your situation has overwhelmed you."

Q shrugged. "That could be. I never thought about it in those terms, but... yes, I suppose I do do that. I feel safer when no one knows what I'm thinking."

Fortunately, he also seemed to enjoy talking about himself, or she would never get him to admit anything. She wondered if she should ask him why he would tell her such things if that were true, and decided against calling his attention to it. "And that's where the repression is coming in. The idea behind emotional expression is to express oneself, not to hide behind a manufactured facade. The more one represses oneself, the more pressure is placed on that facade. You do express yourself frequently-- under normal circumstances, that would be enough to keep the pressure you place on yourself bearable. But these are not normal circumstances for you and will never be as long as you are mortal. The fact that you are suffering constant painful emotions, and to one extent or another hiding most of them, is putting a great deal of pressure on your facade. Every so often it needs to crack."

"It seems as if you're making this unnecessarily complicated," he said, picking up the mug again and holding it in his lap as he looked at her. "There's a much simpler explanation, one that doesn't involve the invocation of all sorts of hypothetical repressed emotions."

"And that is?"

"I'm just depressed." He put down the mug again and leaned forward. "T'Laren, I really think you're making a big deal over nothing. I'm very unhappy. Humans cry when they're unhappy. I am human. You're a Vulcan, you can do logic-- that one's nice and simple, enough for even a Klingon to understand. The fact that I am not crying constantly involves the suppression of emotion, I assume, but one hardly needs to invoke that to explain why I crack."

Actually, he had a point. T'Laren wondered if she was projecting again. "It seemed rather... extreme. Rather sudden."

"It's always sudden. If I can feel it coming on, I can control it usually."

"Why is it important to you to be able to control it?"

Q looked at her as if he had never heard a stupider question in his life. "A Vulcan needs to ask me this?"

"I know where my own desire for emotional control stems from. I am asking about yours."

"Because it's bad enough that I spend all my time whining and complaining, that I'm a complete coward who'll throw dignity to the wind and grovel if threatened, that I spend my entire life worrying about how to avoid pain-- I don't want to be constantly bawling, too. Humans give me little enough respect as it is. And shouting angrily at people or eviscerating them with clever wit are much more acceptable methods of dealing with one's emotions, among humans, than crying is. And I don't know why we're still discussing this; this conversation has to be the most trivial pursuit I've engaged in in quite some time." He stood up. She could almost see his defenses rebuilding themselves, from embarrassment to forced equilibrium and now to anger. "I'm going back to bed. Are you going to continue to refuse me a sedative?"

"Yes."

"Then do me a favor. Don't come in my room unless I actually call for help. I'll come out and get breakfast when I wake up." He turned and walked to the door of the bedroom. "And for future reference, unless you're positive I'm dying, knock first."

"Very well." T'Laren stood, placing the cocoa mug into the disposal beneath the replicator. "I hope your sleep is undisturbed this time."

As she left, she realized, suddenly, why it had happened. Q's explanation, like most of his explanations, had not completely satisfied her-- he had given a reason, but not all the reasons. Now she thought she understood. His defensiveness and his antisocial behavior were all part of the same thing. Earlier tonight, she had gotten him to lower his defenses against her-- leaving him unable to protect himself from his own emotions. In the process of rebuilding his safeguards, Q had started to become defensive and accusatory, and then had withdrawn contact completely by ending the conversation.

He wasn't simply obnoxious because he didn't know any better. It was a defense. She'd known that already, but had not quite realized the obvious corollary-- the more she chipped away at it, the more vulnerable he would become. If he ever realized that, she would never be able to get him to trust her-- he would shut her out completely, perceiving her as a threat. And in a certain sense, she would be.

Perhaps this was going to be more difficult than she'd initially thought.

* * *

Q seriously considered going without breakfast long enough to take apart the replicator and bypass the security control T'Laren had put on it. His head hurt and his eyes were sore, and after his disgraceful behavior last night he would really rather not face a cheerful Vulcan, the way they all seemed to be in the morning. On the other hand, he also didn't feel like doing all the work necessary to bypass the control, and while he wasn't particularly hungry he did require coffee, as quickly as possible. So much for T'Laren's theory that he drank coffee to counteract the effects of his sedatives; he was exhausted, having woken several times in the night with unpleasant dreams. Tonight he was getting his sedative, and he didn't care what he had to do to get it.

After a sonic shower-- _Ketaya_ was equipped with water plumbing, since most humans preferred the less efficient water showers, but Q wasn't most humans-- and other morning ablutions, including a reapplication of makeup to hide the effects of last night's crying jag, he felt marginally capable of facing a fellow sentient. He walked to the kitchen and strode over to the replicator, ignoring T'Laren. "Coffee."

"Decaffeinated," T'Laren piped up before the replicator could start materializing the cup.

He turned on her. As he'd expected, she seemed obscenely cool and wakeful. "What is the point to decaffeinated coffee? Do you think I drink coffee for the taste?"

"It's possible," she said. "Decaf doesn't taste any different, you know."

"I know. I just don't care. What gives you the right to dictate what I drink?"

"I am responsible for your health." She stood up. She was wearing a yellow pantsuit, a crime against fashion if there ever was one-- how could anyone raised on Earth have so little sense of aesthetics as to wear yellow over Vulcan skin? "Breakfast platter," she said to the second replicator, and withdrew a plate full of various foods.

Q raised eyebrows at it. "I always thought overeating was some kind of sin for Vulcans. Or at the very least illogical."

"This isn't mine," she said, and set it down at the table across from her place. "This is for you. I want you to finish all of it."

"You're not serious." Her steady gaze indicated that she was, in fact, perfectly serious. "I can't eat all that! I could maybe manage _half_ that, on a good day. But I'm not anywhere near hungry enough--"

"Sit down and eat," T'Laren interrupted, with no more than her usual calm in her voice. "If you truly cannot finish, we'll simply dispose of the remainder. But I want you to eat as much of it as you can."

Q sat down, not entirely sure why he was bothering. The foods before him were all foods he'd liked, back when he still got any modicum of pleasure whatsoever out of eating. That itself made him less willing to eat. How much information was in his files, anyway? Had Medellin or someone been recording what he got out of the replicators and the frequency of individual foods? "I don't want any of this."

"That's unfortunate," T'Laren said, standing at his shoulder. "It is sad when one must do something one doesn't wish to do."

Or in other words, he still had to eat it. "Can't I get something else?"

"I've analyzed your nutritional requirements and created a program to devise meals that satisfy them. If you ask for something else, the replicator will produce it, but it will also generate complements for it to make a balanced meal, and you'll have to eat them. You might be better off just eating this."

With bad grace, Q took a forkful, wondering in some part of his mind why he wasn't fighting harder. Weakness, perhaps. He was putting up less resistance than he had to Anderson's constant demands, and T'Laren had put much less pressure on him than Anderson ever had. Maybe he was just too tired to fight anyone.

"I'm worried about this power trip of yours, T'Laren," he said. "Forcing me to eat what you want me to eat sounds to me like you're overcontrolling. I got enough of that from Anderson; I'm not putting up with it from you. And I want my sedatives back. I slept miserably last night."

"I can tell," T'Laren said.

Was that a pointed reference to his hysterics last night? Q flushed angrily, and snapped, "A good portion of which was your fault. If you hadn't barged in when you did, I'd have gotten back to sleep without-- oh." T'Laren's fingers pressed into his back just under the collarbone, probing for and loosening painful knots there. It was difficult to maintain his train of thought. "Without... I'd have gotten back to sleep normally and... whatever."

"Maintaining all that anger must be a difficult job," T'Laren said. "You've made yourself tense again. Is it really worth it?"

He really should not allow this. Q remembered how he'd behaved last night-- not the crying jag, but his almost obscene pliability and defenselessness under T'Laren's ministrations. She could have done anything to him, anything at all, and he wouldn't have been able to muster up resistance until it was too late. Obviously he was as vulnerable to pleasure as he was to pain, and he should avoid it for the same reason. He could too easily succumb to this and make as big a fool of himself as he had last night-- he must have looked so incredibly naive and idiotic, going on and on about a backrub as if it were the most pleasurable thing in existence. Far too dangerous. He had to tell her to stop.

In a few minutes.

"I'm not sure I understand you, Q," she said. "You increase your own pain, you know. You fight battles with the wrong people over trivial things, depleting your resources for the important battles. You project anger and disdain at the universe, almost constantly-- don't you realize that that weakens you? You devote so much of your strength to holding up your defenses that every so often your strength runs out and you crumble. If you were more discriminating about what you defended yourself against, you would lose your defenses completely less often."

She didn't understand. Which was good-- she shouldn't understand, she already understood far too much for Q's liking. For a moment, her words reawakened the anger, strengthening him against her. But it was impossible to retain anger or even annoyance at her as her fingers so expertly forced relaxation on him. Q could feel the anger seeping away, stolen away from him by slim fingers, leaving him defenseless.

He jerked away from her. "Don't do that," he said harshly.

"Do what?"

Q turned to face her. T'Laren looked genuinely puzzled. "Don't touch me. Not without asking permission first."

"I-- very well. Forgive me. It was an invasion of your privacy, and I should have known better." She sat down. "Why did you wait so long to tell me to stop, if I was making you uncomfortable?"

That was exactly the sort of question he never wanted to have to answer. What was he supposed to say, "Oh, I liked it too much to make myself ask you to stop?" That certainly lent credibility to his refusal. Humans took statements like that as an excuse to try to persuade one against one's better judgement. He imagined Vulcans-- normal Vulcans, at least-- would take his refusal at face value, and not press further. He had no idea what this one would do. "Drop the subject," he said.

It was one of the weakest attempts to avoid a topic he'd ever produced, and it didn't work. "I can't," she said. "It's important that I know. I cannot simply drop subjects that make you uncomfortable if I'm to help you."

Q sighed. "If you must know, it took me a few minutes to recover from the shock of being touched without permission at all. I'd thought you were more professional than that, T'Laren. You made me very anxious."

T'Laren's expression didn't change. From a Vulcan, he had to take that as a good sign. If he hadn't hurt her, she wouldn't have bothered to keep her face so controlled, and she would have shown some reaction. "You have not previously struck me as someone who freezes in unpleasant situations."

An old bitterness welled to the surface. "No, didn't you hear? I got someone killed by freezing up once. It made me infamous. Well, more infamous than I already was."

"I see," she said, nodding. "You found the situation so unpleasant that you froze. The fact that you relaxed completely and leaned into my touch was an unfortunate side effect of my advanced techniques of Vulcan mind control, which were also responsible for the happiness you experienced last night, the acute depressive attack you experienced later last night, and in fact were responsible for your suicide attempt in the first place."

All of this was said in the same calm, reasonable tone of voice. If Q hadn't listened to the words, he would never have recognized the statement as sarcasm. "Aren't you laying it on a bit thick?" he asked. "The Vulcan mind control line was enough, I think. The rest of it was a bit over the top."

"I _am_ sorry I invaded your privacy without asking," T'Laren said. "I perceived that you were tense, and moved to correct the situation. It had not occurred to me that you have such a desperate need for your anger and tension-- and pain-- that you would be upset with me for easing them for you."

"Need?" Q frowned. "Why would I _need_ pain? I've told you, I'm no masochist. I don't like pain. I also don't like being touched casually. That's all."

"Your files show no sign of such an aversion," T'Laren said.

That was the last straw. Q pushed out of his chair and stood with such force that the chair fell over. "What, do you have _everything_ on record about me?" he demanded. "What I eat and when, who I eat with, what I talk about with them, what I say about them when their back is turned? Do you have monitors running when I go to the bathroom, too? Insights into the psyche obtained by stool inspection? Do you watch me at night and count my dreams from REM movements?"

"The hyperbole is unnecessary," she said, "and will not distract me from the point. We were discussing why you felt the need to reject something you obviously derived enjoyment from, not what is or is not in your files."

"Maybe that's what _you're_ discussing. I'm more concerned about those files. This meal--" He lifted the plate. "All of these are foods I used to like before I stopped liking anything. Do you have that on record too? How much privacy do I have _left?_"

"Your favorite foods are not on any record I ever saw. Foods you are allergic to or dislike strongly are listed in your file, where known-- anything Medellin saw you have an extreme negative reaction to, meaning that the list probably covers only a fraction of the total. I selected common human breakfast foods, such as eggs and fruit, for your meals, and excluded what I know you don't like. If these happen to be foods you particularly like, it's by coincidence only. And I'd advise you to sit down and finish eating them."

Q put the plate down. "I'm not hungry," he muttered.

T'Laren studied him. "Very well. In that case, come with me." She stood up and walked toward the kitchen door.

"Why?" T'Laren had an annoying habit of making demands without explaining her reasons, and Q decided he was going to break her of it. He stood where he was.

T'Laren turned again to face him. "Since your appetite is low, now would be an ideal time to begin a physical training regimen. You have a great deal of tension and hostility that might be more profitably channeled into physical activity, and such activity would increase your appetite."

He wasn't hearing this. He couldn't be. Q looked down at his hands, the only part of his body he could see that he hadn't concealed under clothes designed to tell flattering lies. The fingers were bony skeleton appendages, more like a Mestavan than a human, and the knuckles stood out like a Klingon's forehead ridges. Underneath the gracefully lying fabric he'd hidden himself in, the rest of his body was just as bad-- he had taken pains not to look at himself naked in a mirror for months now, and his condition had gotten considerably worse since his failed suicide attempt. Incredulously he looked up at T'Laren. "You can't seriously want me to exercise in my condition."

"I believe we discussed this last night, Q. Did you believe I'd forgotten?"

Actually, Q himself had forgotten. Now that she'd reminded him, he did remember that she'd threatened to make him exercise. It was as unbelievable now as it had been then. "I thought maybe you'd have come to your senses."

"I don't plan to make you run a marathon," T'Laren said. "For now we'll start with simple stretching exercises. If you can walk, you can do that much."

He supposed that was probably correct, though the idea of doing any kind of exercise whatsoever made him feel immensely put-upon. Sulkily he followed T'Laren to the gym, wondering why he was bothering. "Look, I really don't think I'm up to this. Can't we wait a week or so, until I'm a little stronger?"

"How do you expect to get stronger when you don't eat?" T'Laren went over to the clothing replicator. "Exercise suits."

"All right!" Q threw up his hands. "I'll finish the damned breakfast. Will that make you happy? Are you satisfied?"

T'Laren handed him an exercise suit. "Change into this. You can use the change room over there if you would rather do so privately."

"I already said I'd finish breakfast. What more do you want?"

"You misunderstand," she said. She had gone completely Vulcan; he couldn't read her at all. "I am not Anderson, attempting to coerce you through threatened punishments. This is not a punishment, Q. You are going to exercise. It would be very nice if you would eat as well, but it will not change anything. Now change your clothes-- what you are wearing is too confining for exercise."

"You said it was just stretching."

"It is difficult to stretch when one's clothes will not stretch with you."

"And what if I refuse?" he asked belligerently, folding his arms and glaring at her. "What will you do to me if I walk back to my room right now?"

"Please don't," T'Laren said calmly. "I would not wish to resort to threats."

"Oh, so you _are_ like Anderson. What threats are you not wishing to resort to? Take away my replicator privileges? Oh, wait, it's been done before. Why don't you cut off my computer access? _That_ would be truly original."

"That would be unnecessary," T'Laren said, moving around him to stand in front of the door. She placed her exercise suit in a neat bundle on the floor. "There is only one exit from here, Q. You have three choices: you may stay here in the gymnasium and do nothing, you may attempt to force your way past me, or you may do as I have asked. If you attempt to force your way past me, you will fail. I am a Vulcan, Starfleet-trained, and in perfect health. You would then be left with the previous two choices, and undoubtedly some bruises. So I might suggest limiting your consideration to those two, keeping in mind that I am far more patient than you."

Q stared at her. "You're actually threatening me with physical violence."

"Not at all. I am threatening to turn any attempts of yours at physical violence back at you. I threaten no violence myself."

"Semantics," Q muttered. Had he really thought it would be any different? Wherever he went, people would try to dominate him, to control him, and as long as he had such a glaring weakness as his inability to tolerate boredom, they would succeed.

With extremely bad grace, he took the exercise suit from her and undressed, quite deliberately doing so in front of her. Normally he would have sought privacy to undress-- he had no sense of modesty in the usual sense, but he was ashamed of how thin he was right now, and usually tried to avoid letting anyone see him without clothes to hide the damage. Right now, though, he wanted to flaunt his weakness. Let her see how truly pathetic he looked, and she would realize that he couldn't possibly indulge in any physical exercise now. Out of the corner of his eye, he glanced over to see what her reaction was-- but she, too, was changing, paying no attention to him. Q quickly looked away. Experience had taught him that it was dangerous for him to look at nude attractive humanoids, and while he thought he was probably too ill for it to be a problem right now, there was no sense taking chances. He didn't need to risk humiliation and discomfort right now; he was already uncomfortable enough.

By the time he was done changing, T'Laren was dressed and waiting with arms folded, her stillness conveying the patience of stone. He faced her sullenly. "Now what?"

"Touch your toes without bending your knees."

This felt immensely stupid. Half-heartedly, Q attempted to touch his toes, came to the conclusion that if he couldn't bend his knees his toes might as well be in another solar system, and straightened up. "I can't."

"Try."

He made a few more half-hearted attempts, feeling self-conscious and idiotic. His body simply would not bend that way. It was painful to make the attempt. "Fine, I tried. Happy now?"

"You aren't trying."

"I am too!"

"We will do this until you do it properly. Again."

Q sat down on the floor, arms folded. "I can't do it."

T'Laren looked down at him for several seconds. Q stared back at her, challenging her to do something. Without breaking the stare, T'Laren said, "Q. It is necessary that you learn how to defend yourself physically. I am Starfleet trained, but I am only one person-- I may not always be able to save you. What would you do if your life depended on your ability to hold off some assassin a few moments until I could arrive?"

Q shrugged. "I suppose I'd die," he said blandly. "Which frankly, at the moment, doesn't strike me as an overly unpleasant prospect."

T'Laren continued to stare at him. Q, still unwilling to back down, stared back, studiedly expressionless. Finally T'Laren stepped away from the door, ceasing to block his path out. "Get up and come with me."

He stood up. "What now?"

"I have something to show you."

Q made an exasperated noise. "Like _what?_ I'm getting very tired of these vague directives of yours, T'Laren."

"It would be meaningless if I told you what in advance," she said. "I believe it will be something of interest to you."

"I doubt it," Q muttered, but went with her. Curiosity had always been one of his greatest weaknesses.

They walked a short distance down the hall to the lift. "Deck 4," T'Laren said, and they descended.

"What's on Deck 4?"

"Airlocks, maintenance and supply."

"Oh, you've got a present for me, hidden in the supply closet. How nice. T'Laren, you shouldn't have." No response. Not even a "Shut up, Q." This was beginning to frighten him. It was fine to offend people, but not to the point where they stopped talking to him.

"Is it bigger than a breadbox?" Q persisted, as they stepped off the turbolift. "Or perhaps you're going to show me the skeletons in your closet. Are there dead bodies down here? Victims of some arcane Vulcan rite?" Still no response. Q was not used to being ignored, not when there was no one else to talk to, and it was making him desperate. What did he have to do to get a reaction out of her again?

T'Laren palmed the door to the main airlock, and it lifted. Now Q was getting extremely nervous. "T'Laren?" he asked, backing away. "Why are you opening the airlock?"

"I have some knowledge of death by vacuum," she said calmly. "It is a quick death and a merciful one. There are a few brief moments of pain, but the cold quickly robs one of consciousness. I imagine it is far less painful than drinking etching solution."

She was completely insane. Q's blood went cold with fear. "I imagine so," he said weakly, and then turned to bolt desperately for the lift.

He never even got close. The moment his back was turned, the moment he began to run, T'Laren's arm grabbed his and snagged him back. He stumbled, windmilling with his free arm, trying to pull free, but it was useless. T'Laren reeled him in to her and turned him toward the airlock, pushing. Q dug in his heels, not that that did much good with shipboots on an uncarpeted ship's corridor floor. "No-- don't-- please don't--"

"Why are you resisting? This is what you want," T'Laren said. She lifted him slightly, so he could no longer brace himself against the floor, and shoved, releasing him. Q staggered, falling forward into the airlock. As he caught himself against the far wall, he heard the hum of the door lowering behind him.

"_No!_" He turned and lunged at the airlock door, too late. It shut with a clang that sounded unpleasantly like a death knell. The top half of the door was transparasteel-- Q could see T'Laren outside the lock, standing by the release button with the same lack of expression she'd shown before. Terrified, he pounded on the transparasteel. "Let me out! Please! _Please!_"

T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "I do not understand what you are afraid of," she said. "Not five minutes ago, you expressed complete unconcern at the possibility of your own death. I no longer wished to torment you by forcing you to remain alive against your will."

He had known she was mentally unstable, and he had gone with her anyway. Stupid _fool!_ There was no one here to save him-- he was trapped alone in an airlock with a mad Vulcan on the other side and no one else around for light-years. Q sank to his knees, terrified, hands and face pressed firmly against the transparasteel. "Please. Please, let me out. Don't kill me. Please."

"You do not, in fact, wish to die."

"No. No. I don't. Please, don't kill me, _please_..."

"But you do understand that this would be a far kinder death than you could expect from some assailant. That _is_ clear to you, I hope."

She was going to kill him. It was obvious that she'd made up her mind. His life was moments away from ending, and he couldn't think of what to say, what to do to make her let him go. He had expected to be killed by some revenge-craving member of a highly advanced species unknown to humanity, not an insane citizen of the Federation to whom he'd done nothing personally. "Yes, yes, I know, I still don't want to die! T'Laren, _please!_ Let me out!"

"It is your decision," she said. "Consider it carefully." Her hand hovered near the airlock release. "If you live, you will continue to be plagued by aches and pains, at risk for a worse death, lonely and crippled. Death will end your suffering, you understand. Simply tell me your decision, and I will carry it out for you."

It was hopeless. She wasn't listening to him. Q sagged, his head sinking below the level of the transparasteel, where he could no longer see his tormenter. He began to sob helplessly, despairingly. "T'Laren, don't kill me, please don't kill me, please..."

"Very well," her voice came, echoing in the airlock. A moment later the door he was leaning against moved upward.

Q crawled out of the airlock as soon as the opening was big enough for him to fit through, away from T'Laren, and sat up against the far wall of the corridor, hugging his knees as he tried to control his breathing. He still didn't feel safe. He didn't know what he'd said that had finally gotten through to her, and he didn't know what he'd said that had precipitated the attempt in the first place, and so he had no way of knowing that it would not happen again or that she wouldn't carry through her threat next time.

Footsteps approached. He glanced up, saw T'Laren coming over toward him, and flinched, curling inward more tightly. "Q," she said gently.

"Changed your mind?" he asked raggedly. "Going to finish me off anyway?"

"Q, I wasn't actually trying to kill you."

That statement was too outrageous for him to devise a suitable reply. He looked up and glared at her. "No?" he finally said, a wealth of disgust and disbelief in the one word.

"The airlocks have safety interlocks on them. They can't be opened to vacuum if there's a life form inside, not unless one bypasses the interlocks-- and I'm not an engineer. I'd have no idea how to go about bypassing the safety features. I couldn't have spaced you if I'd wanted to."

The words sank in slowly. She hadn't been trying to kill him. She had been trying to make it look as if she would, to humiliate and terrify him, to make a complete fool out of him. Terror began to transmute to rage. "How dare you?" Q asked, getting to his feet. Rage built up uncontrollably, hazing his vision. "How _dare_ you!"

Fury overpowered him completely, and he lunged at T'Laren, pinning her back against the wall. Had he the power, he would have thrown her into the heart of a sun, dismembered her cell by quivering cell, cast her into a hellish pocket dimension to suffer eternities of agony. He couldn't do any of those things anymore, so he locked his fingers around her slim neck and squeezed with all the strength of his rage, lifting her off her feet and slamming her into the wall. "How _dare_ you humiliate me like this! Who-- do you-- think-- you-- _are?_" he screamed, punctuating the question by repeatedly smashing her head back into the bulkhead.

Even the power of his rage, however, was not quite enough to match a Vulcan's strength. Perhaps it would have if his body had been stronger. As it was, though, T'Laren's fingers wrapped around his and pried him loose from her throat. She pushed him back and sank to the floor, gasping. Q staggered backward, the aftermath of the sudden adrenaline rush catching up with him. Weakness overwhelmed him, the counterpoint of the rush of strength a minute ago, and he too had to sit down on the floor.

He had never been so angry. Not in his entire mortal life had he felt such fury at someone that he had attacked them physically. In his entire existence, he could remember only one other time that his rage had so overpowered his reason, and that had been a cold, slow rage, burning for years. That had been with Azi... and Azi had betrayed the friendship of millennia, had been far more to him than T'Laren could ever be. But the way he felt now, the weak helpless fury, the betrayal... was as close an approximation to how he'd felt when Azi had attacked and nearly destroyed him as he thought he could get in mortal form. T'Laren should be afraid, he thought. T'Laren should be very afraid. No one hurt him like that without suffering for it.

"Impressive," T'Laren said hoarsely, struggling to her feet. "I'd been informed you have no natural instinct for physical violence. Somebody was mistaken, it seems."

"If I weren't so weak, I would kill you," Q said, getting up off the floor himself.

"If you weren't so weak, it would have been far harder for someone to threaten your life in such fashion. Q, my point here has not been to needlessly humiliate you."

The look he gave her could have fused hydrogen into helium. "No?" he asked, not loudly, but with white-hot rage behind it. "Clarify for me. What _was_ your point here?"

"You essentially said you didn't care if someone killed you. I believed you were lying, if not to me then to yourself, and decided to prove my theory. Obviously you do not, in fact, wish to die."

"I do, in fact, wish to kill _you_."

"Irrelevant," she said sharply. "We aren't discussing your views on my continued existence, but on your own. My original point was that, if you do not learn to defend yourself, you are likely to be killed. You told me you didn't care. I believe we have just proven that that is untrue."

"Oh, no," Q snapped. He stepped closer to T'Laren, and she took a half-step backward. "If you only wanted to prove that I didn't want to die, you _could_ have let me go the first time I asked you to. But no. You waited until I was completely broken, on my knees begging and sobbing, before you relented. That was unnecessary by anyone's standards. No, you got angry at me and decided to humiliate me. Admit it."

"I'm above that," T'Laren said frostily.

"Oh? Are you, now. How intriguing. The Vulcan whose emotional control is so incompetent that she got thrown out of Starfleet and ended up trying to kill herself is above getting angry. Really. What a fascinating notion."

T'Laren moved sideways, putting space between herself and Q. "I am not above getting angry," she said. "I am, however, above humiliating a patient because I am angry. I would advise you not to judge the entire universe by what you yourself would do."

He raised his eyebrows. "Obviously you're not above taking cheap shots," he said. "Really, T'Laren. References to my past history? You can do better than _that_, I'm sure."

"This isn't a contest."

"No, you're quite right. This isn't a contest. This is much more serious." Q imposed on her space again, backing her into the wall. "This is a question of trust, and I'm very much afraid you just lost mine."

"I explained that I had no intention of killing you. You may examine the safety interlock if you choose."

"Oh, I believe you. I know you didn't plan to kill me. What you planned-- and what you _did_\-- was to play games with my head."

"As if you have never done such a thing yourself."

"Of course I have, that's not the point! _I_ am not a psychologist! You abused the power I gave you--"

"I did no such thing!" T'Laren twisted away from him again and took a position half a meter away. "You are obstructionist, defeatist and a liar, both to yourself and to others. I perceived that you needed to be made aware of the vulnerability of your position--"

"No, no, and _no!_" Q could shout over anyone when he tried. He grabbed T'Laren's arm and loomed over her again, getting in her face. "I offended you, hurt your feelings or whatever you have that passes for them, and _you_ decided to get even. Frightening me was probably intended to teach me a lesson, yes, I'm sure you had good and noble reasons when you first got the idea. But you dragged it out far too long for that to have been all it was. No, T'Laren, I know revenge when I see it."

She yanked her arm out of his grasp. "I acted as a healer, in the best interests of my patient. I do not care what delusions you choose to believe, but that is the truth."

Q laughed unpleasantly. "Oh, don't try to _lie_ to me, T'Laren," he said. "I have uncounted millennia of experience with deception. I know a lie when I see one, too."

"It is obvious to me why you would choose to believe your own version of events," T'Laren said in a voice like liquid nitrogen. "What is less obvious is why you would find that version so offensive. You endeavored so forcefully, so skillfully, to offend me and to cause me to react against you that it would undoubtedly be very disappointing to you to believe that it did not work. You would far prefer to believe yourself successful. I understand this. I fail to understand, however, why you insist on the pretense that _your_ feelings are hurt, that _you_ are offended, by your belief that I took revenge against you. Why would you be so displeased at an effect you worked so hard to achieve?"

"Then you admit it was revenge."

"I admit that you believe it was, and that I am bewildered at your reaction to your own belief. The actual facts are as I have previously stated them."

Q stared at her. "You're worse than me," he finally said. "When I get caught out, I generally admit it. You refuse to acknowledge that I'm right."

"It is irrelevant whether or not you are right. What is relevant is that you are making a great show of being disturbed by your belief that I attacked you for revenge. I do not understand why."

"Because I trusted you!" Q shouted at her. "And you humiliated me! I thought you were going to _kill_ me, T'Laren. Have you any _idea_ how frightened I was?"

T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "Why would you have so feared death?" she asked. "Death is what you thought you wanted, isn't it?"

"In _my_ time, on _my_ terms, at _my_ hands, yes! Maybe! But I don't care _what_ you say about how quick it is and whatnot, I don't want someone else throwing me out an airlock!" The effort of shouting was making him dizzy. He took a deep breath. "And that's beside the point, anyway. The point is that I trusted you and you humiliated me, for your own personal satisfaction, and I don't want to be trapped on a starship depending on someone who does that kind of thing."

"Indeed. Your solution, then?"

"Turn this ship around. I want to go back to Starbase 56."

She nodded and turned away, walking toward the lift. "Very well. If that is what you wish."

He had expected more of an argument about it. "You're just going to take me back?"

T'Laren stopped, but did not face him. "This excursion was intended to benefit you. If you intend to derive no benefit from it, there is no point. I will return you to your old life on Starbase 56." Now she turned to face him. Her face had gone through cold and expressionless out the other side. The wintry devil's mask she wore bore little resemblance to a humanoid face. It was like a legendary beast's, or a demon's, a rage that burned as cold as frozen oxygen. "And when you die, when you take your own life out of boredom and despair, you will be unmourned. Your people will have written you off as a failure, for refusing to grasp at your only chance; those who know you will consider themselves well rid of you; the Federation will regret the loss of a resource, but no more than that. I will grieve for my failure. No one else will think of you at all."

The words were a knife in his heart. Q smiled cruelly, hiding his pain. "I don't think you'll be grieving," he said softly. "I don't think you'll do anything at all. Lhoviri gave you his 'gifts' as payment for something it seems you're not going to do, now. And the Q don't tolerate failures. Lhoviri will almost certainly take his gifts back." He let the smile broaden, as he studied her face for any sign of pain or fear or anything at all. "Didn't you say he gave you your life and your sanity? If he's very merciful, he may let you keep _one_."

The utter lack of reaction told Q everything he needed to know. He stood there wearing a smiling mask, as an expressionless T'Laren turned from him and went back up the lift. He took the lift himself as soon as it came back down, still wearing the mask, and went into his room. Only then, safely unobserved, did the mask break. Q collapsed onto his bed, feeling despair encroaching again. T'Laren had been absolutely right. He would die unmourned, forgotten, his existence rendered irrelevant to everyone he had ever cared about. Alive, there was nothing left to him but hopelessness. Dead, there would be nothing left of him at all.

He stared at the ceiling, breathing deeply, trying to control himself. Anger and self-pity and encroaching despair roiled around inside, fighting for domination. It was in his best interests to make sure anger won-- despair led to tears or suicide attempts, while anger gave him strength. So he focused his attention on being angry at T'Laren.

__

_This_

_, he thought furiously, was why he hadn't wanted to trust her in the first place, why he hadn't wanted to believe she could help him or hope for anything at all. There was nothing more painful than shattered hope. And he knew he had begun to hope-- the depth of his terror when he'd thought T'Laren would kill him told him that. It wasn't as if he'd lied to her-- no, he didn't want to be killed by someone else, and no, he didn't want to die by going out an airlock. Two weeks ago, however, both alternatives would have been completely acceptable. She was right that death by vacuum was easier than death by drinking acid. He'd observed mortals dying in vacuum often enough to know that shock drove them unconscious very quickly, and the pain they suffered before that time was simply not in the same league as the pain of having etching solution devouring one's guts. _

That was odd, actually. Two weeks ago, he had been willing to put himself through excruciating torment. The agony he'd suffered, while brief, had been more intense than any pain he'd been through yet, and it had been something he'd done to himself. He would have jumped at the chance to go out an airlock, then; would have been overjoyed to find a method of dying as sure as the acid and less painful, and he wouldn't have _cared_ who did it to him. Part of the reason he'd provoked the Klingons, aside from the fact that it was fun to provoke Klingons, had been a secret, half-hearted hope that they'd bash his skull in for him. He had been entirely willing to be killed, as long as the method involved less pain and humiliation than he'd planned for himself.

Yet not half an hour ago, he had been broken, groveling, sobbing with terror because he'd thought he would be killed. That went far beyond not wanting to be murdered. He had genuinely not wanted to die.

Somewhere along the way, without his noticing it, he must have decided he wanted to live. He must have succumbed to hope, and begun to actually believe T'Laren would help him. And that brought him around in a circle to the utter cruelty of her betrayal. If she hadn't made him hope, it could not possibly hurt so much to see that hope destroyed. If she hadn't come into his life--

\--he would still be on Starbase 56, where he was headed back to now. And nothing would be any different from what it was before.

"Damn you, Lhoviri," Q whispered. He'd seen the trap, had walked into it with his eyes wide open, and now he was caught. "_Damn_ you."

In a month, or maybe less, things would get unbearable again, and he would find a way to kill himself. It would have to be even more sure than the acid was, something that could not fail barring a flagrant violation of the laws of physics, which Lhoviri would be loath to do. Probably it would end up being even more painful as well. And after he was dead, no one would mourn him. The Continuum would write him off as a failure. Someone who rejected his last chance for survival didn't deserve to live. Humanity hated him and would be glad to be rid of him. Everyone else in the universe hated him worse and would be even more glad.

He would not get another chance. If he rejected T'Laren, Lhoviri wouldn't send anyone else. This was it, his last opportunity. After what she had done he could not possibly trust her-- but if he didn't, at least to the extent of staying aboard _Ketaya_ with her, he would have no hope at all.

But she couldn't possibly _actually_ turn the ship around and return to the starbase, he thought. She knew what was at stake-- he had warned her. If she let him step off this ship and go back to the place where he'd die, without any argument, any attempt to stop him or persuade him, she would have failed. And Lhoviri was not forgiving. He disliked interfering with things. If he had saved T'Laren's life and T'Laren didn't hold up her end of the bargain, it would make perfect sense to Lhoviri to erase the effects of his own interference and eliminate T'Laren, let the death that should have claimed her get her two years late. T'Laren knew that; Q had warned her. She would have to come back in here to apologize, to beg him to give all this a second chance. Then he would magnanimously forgive her.

If that was the plan, one presumed they were traveling back to the starbase at some ungodly slow speed, warp three perhaps, to give her plenty of time to talk him out of it. "Computer," he said, "what's our ETA to Starbase 56?"

"ETA three hours," the computer said.

__

_Three hours!_

_Q jerked to a sitting position. That _couldn't_ be right. "What speed are we traveling at?"_

"Warp nine."

That made no sense. Why would they travel _back_ to Starbase 56 three orders of magnitude as quickly as they'd left it, when T'Laren's survival depended on them not actually returning at all? Why would she take them so quickly? Did she _want_ Lhoviri to kill her? Or maybe, like so many other mortals Q had known, she wouldn't quite understand the depth of the Continuum's ruthlessness until it was too late. Maybe, for all her protestations otherwise, she really did trust Lhoviri.

Trusting _fool!_ Q knew better than anyone how trustworthy the Q were, or were not, especially Lhoviri, who in many respects was an older version of himself. He had to make her understand the danger she was in. Q got up and strode out of the room, heading for the lift to the bridge.

* * *

He strode out onto the bridge. "Why are we traveling at warp 9?" he demanded.

T'Laren didn't look up at him. "One would not wish to waste time," she said.

Q walked over to her seat and leaned over the back of it, speaking to the top of T'Laren's head. "You do realize that your life ends the moment we get back to the starbase. I told you, Lhoviri won't be forgiving."

"You told me that, yes."

"Well?" He glared down at her. "Aren't you going to try to talk me out of wanting to go back?"

"Why?"

"Because!" Exasperated, he circled her chair and faced her, since she was refusing to look up at him. "If we actually return to Starbase 56, you'll die! Don't you want to live?"

"In the first place, I have only your word for it that I will die. You may be mistaken, or lying. And secondly, I do not consider it a worthwhile idea to beg you to do something that would primarily benefit yourself. You have a hard enough time as it is comprehending that actions have consequences."

"The consequences of this particular action would be your death. Or at the very least you'll go insane again. It seems to me like _you're_ the one who's ignoring the consequences of your actions."

T'Laren finally looked up at him. "I will not coddle you," she said. "You are well aware that your life will be desperately unhappy on Starbase 56, and that you will undoubtedly end up attempting suicide again. You may well succeed this next time; after refusing the help the Continuum sent you, I doubt they will be eager to help you again. Yet it is your desire to return to that. I cannot argue with such profound irrationality."

"You don't understand. Lhoviri will _kill_ you." Q snapped his fingers. "Like that, out like a light. You're nothing to him. He'll just get rid of you to keep things tidy."

"_You_ do not understand. That is irrelevant."

"Well... not to me." Q turned away. If she refused to beg him to stay with her, there were still ways to accomplish the objective and save face. "Right now, I'm still furious at you, I still think you humiliated me needlessly, and I still don't trust you. But you don't deserve to die for any of that." He turned back to her. "Turn the ship back, T'Laren, we'll go to the conference. I don't need your death on my head."

"It would be on Lhoviri's head, not yours."

"Still."

"Q, if you do not trust me there is no point to our continuing with an empty charade. We would accomplish nothing, I would still have failed, and Lhoviri presumably would still kill me. I would prefer to get it over with."

"All right!" he snapped. "I don't have a choice, do I? It doesn't matter how many times you betray me, I have to trust you because you're the only game in town. So turn the ship around. We're going to the conference." He turned back toward the lift. "I wouldn't want to miss a chance to harass so many scientists at the same time anyway."

Behind him, he heard her sigh. "That's not a very constructive reason to want to go someplace."

Q grinned. He had her. She was back now.

He wiped the grin off his face and turned back. "Probably not. But I'm not well-known for my constructive reasoning."

T'Laren studied him for a moment or two without speaking. "If you have decided to trust me, on whatever provisional basis, will you also trust that I have your best interests in mind when I require that you eat? And exercise? And learn some modicum of self-defense?"

Q thought about it. She _was_ right. He knew that, even as his mind rebelled against the knowledge. It was simply that he couldn't stand being told what to do. "Give me back replicator access and some amount of veto power over _what_ I eat, and you're on."

Her face, in the slow process of thawing, went stone again. "Bargains?"

"Whatever works," Q said. He leaned forward, propping himself on the railing. "T'Laren, if you're such a control freak that you can't allow me _any_ power over my own life, then this won't work and we may as well go back. I will try my best to be reasonable-- I just don't like being told what to do. It makes me very, uh..."

"Stubborn?" The stone cracked with the arch of an eyebrow. "Unreasonable? Obnoxious?"

Q shrugged, grinning in mock abashment. Abruptly T'Laren's face relaxed, and he was once more dealing with a living sentient being, not a statue of one. "All right, Q. As long as you can be reasonable about it, I'll let you control what you eat. I downloaded the list of replicator restrictions from Starbase 56, so you can have access to the replicators immediately, under the same restrictions as you had before. But I'd still like you to eat with me, and we still have to go do those exercises."

He sighed, sitting down abruptly. "It's so hard, T'Laren. I'm tired, and I'm weak, and I feel like an idiot when I try to do anything with my body. I just won't stretch that way."

T'Laren stood up, walking over to him. "There are two solutions I can see. One is that we try water exercises instead. Your weakness and lack of flexibility won't matter as much in water, the pool won't let you drown, and you need to learn how to swim as well. The other is that you let me massage the tension out before we start the stretching, so that you'll be able to stretch with a minimum of pain."

Q put his chin on his hand and made a great show of thinking about it. "Hmm. Let's consider... a difficult question, this. On the one hand, I could get cold and wet, inhale large quantities of water through my nose, wear a bathing costume of some sort that shows off my skeletal limbs to maximum boniness, and make a fool of myself splashing about through a medium that this body is most certainly not evolved for. On the other hand, you could give me a massage. Let me ponder." He looked up at her with a perfectly deadpan expression. "Could I have a few hours to think about it?"

For a brief second, almost too quickly for him to notice it, T'Laren smiled. Then the expression was gone, but left in its wake a considerably friendlier face. "I take it you're leaning toward the massage?"

"I think I favor that alternative, yes."

She helped him to his feet. "Let's go to the gym," she said. "If bribery is what it takes to get you to exercise, I have no moral problems with bribing you."

"How wonderful. I have no moral problems with being bribed, so this will work out fine. Lead the way, dear doctor." They stepped onto the lift. "If I'm going to go through all the pain of being forced to exercise, after all, I should get _something_ pleasant in exchange..."

* * *

To T'Laren's amazement, Q was actually capable of being somewhat reasonable. He complained all the way through the exercise session, but at least he did what he was told. And afterward, when she requested their lunches from the replicator, he ate his without complaint and even with some enthusiasm. He seemed to have completely forgotten about the incidents this morning, leading her to wonder just how long he held grudges. There was evidence that as an omnipotent being, he'd been capable of holding a grudge for centuries, but from what she had seen and heard from him and the people she'd interviewed, he seemed far quicker to forgive than anybody gave him credit for. She doubted she'd get a straight answer out of him if she asked-- but then, sometimes his obfuscations were revealing in themselves.

"How well do you hold grudges, Q?" she asked.

He looked up from the raisin bagel he'd been intent on. "What brought that on?"

"Curiosity," she said, with a slight tilt of the head. "I will undoubtedly ask questions out of nowhere fairly often, so perhaps you should get used to it. Feel free to do the same."

"All right," he said, straight-faced. "What's the exchange rate for latinum to Andorian sessis?"

"Relevant questions," T'Laren clarified, as Q grinned. "And I don't want my question to be dismissed. Do you generally hold grudges?"

"That's... complicated." He took another bite of the bagel and said with his mouth full, "What kind of grudges? Against who?"

"Anyone."

"Well, that narrows the field considerably, thanks." Q put the bagel down. "Do I have replicator access now?"

"Yes."

"Good." He turned to the replicator. "Another steak sandwich, this time _without_ all the lettuce."

"Is this a terribly sensitive question for you, that you're ignoring me?"

"Not at all. I'm hungry. What is this fetish you Vulcans have for lettuce, anyway? If I have to eat a vegetable, can't it be something that doesn't taste like crispy water?"

"I find it interesting that you suddenly became hungry after I asked you a question."

Q sighed in exasperation. "I'm not avoiding the question, T'Laren. I'm eating my lunch. I'll answer your question in a second, all right?"

T'Laren sipped at her cassava juice, watching him. He took a bite of the sandwich, put it down hurriedly, opened it and applied various condiments, taking small bites after each application to check the flavor. "You realize," she said, "you could have gotten it out of the replicator in exactly the condition you wanted it in."

"I didn't know what condition I wanted it in. This is trial and error." Finally satisfied, he gestured at her with the sandwich-holding hand. "All right, your question. I have been known to forgive people transgressions that other Q would have obliterated them for. I have also been known to enact hideous and lengthy revenges for offenses other Q would have found trivial. Can you give me a context for your question? Grudges for what?"

"Since you became mortal, have you held grudges against people who have humiliated you?"

"Oh!" He nodded with dramatic comprehension. "You want to know if I'm holding a grudge against _you_."

She would have thought that would have been immediately obvious to him. Perhaps he was being deliberately dense. "In part, yes. But it is also a general question."

"Well, then no." He took another bite of the sandwich. "It is amazing how much hungrier I feel. I don't think I've had this much appetite in months."

"It's the physical activity," T'Laren said. "By no, you mean you don't hold grudges against people for humiliating you?"

"No, I mean I don't hold a grudge against _you_."

"That wasn't what I was asking."

Q sighed. "You're annoying, you know that?"

"I believe that's an excellent example of the pot calling the stainless steel serving fork black."

Q blinked at her. "That isn't how it goes."

"You aren't the only one permitted to paraphrase old Earth sayings. Why am I annoying?"

"I don't hold grudges against people I need," Q said. "For instance, while I've far from forgotten all of Commodore Anderson's attempts to blackmail and coerce me into doing her will, I've more or less forgiven her for them. Actually, in some respects I'm very quick to forgive. One can't spend all one's time standing on one's dignity when one's role in life is that of a provocateur. Occasionally the provoked will come up with some creative method of striking back, and one can hardly destroy them for doing exactly what one pushed them into doing."

"Weren't we discussing your mortal life?"

"I'm explaining why I tolerate minor insults to my dignity, in the context of my entire existence. You see..." He took a drink of grape juice. "For example. This one's in my records, so it's hardly anything you don't know. Five years ago or so-- well, more or less five years, I haven't been keeping close track-- I attempted to persuade Riker to join the Continuum, for... what seemed like good reasons at the time. It was in part a genuine attempt. It was also a game, a test, a challenge and a number of other things. Picard offered a bet with me that Riker would defeat the challenge I'd set him. I, of course, knew that no human could _possibly_ resist the temptation of godlike power, so I cheerfully accepted."

"I take it things did not work out as planned."

"They did not. Riker refused-- how, I still don't know. Picard then indulged in a little bit of personal gloating over the fact that he'd won the bet, and therefore I had to leave. At that moment I was quite enraged with him. I mean, think about it. This little insect, making demands of _me_, a god! I might have destroyed him if... circumstances had been different."

He lifted his grape juice glass. "In the long run, however, I'm not that petty. I go around challenging mortals to beat the tests I set for them-- I really don't let it get to me when they succeed. In fact, the ones that succeed, that actually defeat my tests, fascinate me. It was the reason I came back to humanity after they beat my Farpoint test, and the reason I chose to warn Picard about the Borg, and the reason I kept studying the race. On the other hand, yes, I am capable of holding grudges. The worst thing I ever did in my entire existence was for revenge on someone." He drank.

"What was that?"

Q put down his glass hard and leaned forward. "T'Laren, you _know_ my history. If _I_ say that something is the worst thing I've ever done, something I was ashamed of even when I was still all-powerful, one can imagine roughly how bad it had to have been. Now what makes you think that I would for any reason whatsoever want to _tell_ someone about it?"

"Why would you have brought it up if you didn't?"

"As a relevant example. You don't need to know the details."

"I wouldn't judge you, Q. That's not my place."

"No, it's not your place, but yes, you would. No sentient could avoid it. I don't care how objective and logical you think you are, if you knew the whole sordid story you would judge me. Harshly."

"What was the general nature of it? Did you destroy a sentient species?"

"Nothing like that," Q snapped impatiently. "Actually, I _have_ destroyed sentient species, but never without reason. This was..." He sighed. "You're not going to stop hounding me until I toss you a bone, are you?"

"I _am_ curious," T'Laren admitted.

"Suffice it to say that someone I cared for very much hurt me very badly, both physically and emotionally-- which is a neat trick when you consider that I was invulnerable-- and in retaliation I did... something heinous even by _my_ standards." He stared into nothing. "I became ashamed of it even when I had the power to correct my mistake... but not ashamed enough, it seems. Pride wouldn't let me. And now I have a much better idea of exactly what I did to her."

T'Laren had to admit to being desperately curious. What _would_ a being who shrugged off genocide consider a heinous act? She risked a wild guess. "Was it Guinan?"

"_No_!" Q looked simultaneously astonished and disgusted. "What _ever_ gave you that idea?"

"I spoke to Guinan, when I was on the _Enterprise_\--"

"When were _you_ on the _Enterprise_?"

"About-- three or four months ago. I'm not entirely sure-- time passed strangely when I was with Lhoviri on a frequent basis. I was interviewing people who remembered you, in preparation for taking you as my patient."

"Well, I'm glad to hear that some preparation went into it. What _did_ Guinan say? I can't imagine she told you much; she's too addicted to her woman-of-mystery act."

"Very little. Only that you had had dealings with one another two centuries ago, and that she approved of my mission to humanize you."

"What? No vitriol about how the irresponsible Continuum lets its irresponsible children run amok in the universe? No choice comments about what a pathetic human being I am? Didn't she even wish you luck?"

"She did wish me luck, in fact." T'Laren leaned forward. "What happened between you?"

Q leaned back in his chair. "Oh, I had a little misunderstanding with Guinan. I understood that she was not a danger to me, not gratuitously cruel, and not a treacherous bitch. Obviously, I fell a bit short of omniscient there."

T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "That sounds rather one-sided."

"It is. It's my side. If you want Guinan's side, why don't you ask her? You being such pals with her and all."

"I received the distinct impression that what little she told me was all she planned to. What did you do to her?"

"Hardly anything at all. Not in comparison to what she did to me."

"Then what _did_ she do to you?"

Q raised a hand and ticked off on his fingers. "She lied to me. Tricked me. Betrayed me. Lied to me. Defied me. Threatened my existence. Did I mention she lied?"

T'Laren had to work to maintain control. She should not be amused by this, she knew. "You sound like a man speaking of an ex-lover."

"Guinan was _not_ my lover!" Q snapped. "I have better taste than that."

"But she could hardly have betrayed you had you not trusted her to some degree in the first place."

"Well, she wasn't my lover. That would have been bestiality. For a Q to actually fall in love with a mortal, even a long-lived one... it happens, I'll admit, but not to me, not in all the millions of years I lived. I would never have lowered myself that way."

"But the one we mentioned before-- the one you said you cared about--"

"Azi was a Q. She had been my best friend for... I don't want to talk about this." He stood up, tossing the remains of the steak sandwich next to the remains of the bagel. "Why do I let you do this to me?"

"What?"

"Don't play innocent, T'Laren! You know perfectly well what you're doing!"

"Yes, I know what I'm doing... but not how you perceive what I'm doing. I ask again, what?"

"I told you I didn't want to discuss it. Not Azi, not Guinan, not anything like that. Yet somehow I find myself telling you secrets that I would have sworn a tractor beam couldn't have gotten out of me. As a professional provocateur, I would dearly love to know how you're doing it. It amazes me that in ten thousand years of doing this sort of thing, there could be _any_ tricks I'd missed."

T'Laren shook her head. "It's not a trick. I'm not manipulating you, Q. If you're telling me things, it's because you want to."

"But I don't want to!" he shouted. "You're... I don't know what you're doing, but you're making me tell you things."

She merely looked at him for several seconds. Q reddened, but held his ground. "It's true," he insisted.

"I'm trying to help you, and you know it," she said gently. "That's why you're telling me things. You know you have no hope if I can't help you, and you know that I can't help you if you don't answer my questions."

"I really don't see how me telling you about Azi is supposed to help you help me."

"It gives me some insight into you," T'Laren said. "Normally I prefer to learn about my patients' backgrounds in as much detail as possible. You are in many ways the most alien being I've ever treated. If you had anything analogous to a childhood, it's doubtful you could express it in terms I could understand without oversimplifying to the point of uselessness. You obviously have what you've analogized as family conflicts, but with you the family appears to include your entire species. So anything you _can_ tell me, anything I can understand, gives me a point of reference to understanding you. I know now that the Q are capable of love--"

"Azi wasn't my lover, either. The Q don't have sex."

"I didn't say she was your lover. I said you loved her. You may have loved her as a sister, or a best friend, or a mother for all I know. And she did something to you that hurt you badly, and in response you did something so horrible to her that you feel Lhoviri would be justified in tormenting you in turn."

"I never said--"

"You did. Vulcans are good at logic, Q. I can put two and two together at least as well as you." She stood up. "Knowing this really does help. I know now that the sensations of guilt and betrayal had not been alien to you, the way that... for example, that physical pain had been. You had experienced such emotional hurts before losing your powers. And no, you're right-- I probably don't need to know the details. Which is undoubtedly why you didn't tell me them."

"Don't credit me with great insights," Q said tiredly. He walked away from her and perched himself on the counter. "I am quite positive I have no subconscious insight into what you require for your profession. I said whatever I did... presumably because for a brief psychotic moment I actually wanted you to know. You really don't know what I'm capable of, T'Laren." He looked down at the floor, kicking his legs listlessly against the cabinets under the counter like an overgrown child. "You really don't. You may have heard a few choice bits from Lhoviri, you've read my files, but... you _really_ don't know me. And... it's odd, part of me actually _wants_ you to know. I suppose on the somewhat perverse principle of a trickster's form of honesty. But I'm not that masochistic. I really hope you do never find out."

She walked over to him and stood next to where he sat, leaning very slightly against the counter. "Q... I won't pry into anything you really don't want to discuss. But it's part of my job to try to get you to admit to unpleasant truths about yourself."

"Oh, I've been doing plenty of that. I think sometimes that's all I've done, these past three years." He slid off the counter. "That was a bad idea."

"What was?"

"Sitting up there. My back is killing me. Massage or no massage, I am not made for exercise, stretching or otherwise."

T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "You just want a backrub."

Q turned to look at her, a grin of mock embarrassment spreading across his face. "You see right through me."

"Sit down where I can reach you." Q obeyed with alacrity. "I really am going to have to teach you self-relaxation exercises."

"And how to swim. And how to behave in company. And how not to have nightmares."

"Yes. All of that."

He sighed, leaning back into her touch. "You want to know what you can about my background? About what it was like, to be part of the Continuum? That is more or less what you were fishing for before, with all that about you needing to know whatnot, isn't it?"

He was actually volunteering information. T'Laren raised both eyebrows, startled. "I... would like to know anything you're willing to tell me, yes."

"This will probably help you understand, then." Q turned his head slightly to look up at her. "Refresh my memory. Vulcans are telepaths, but it's activated only by touch, right? Normally you're linked with only one other person at most?"

"Yes."

"But when you're linked-- it's a melding? Not just mind-reading, but mind-combining?"

"When a link is formed, it's through a meld. We don't have to meld. We can project through any solid matter, with sufficient concentration, and read emotions through touch, if we aren't shielded. But... yes, initiating a link requires a meld."

"Humans aren't telepaths," Q said, relaxing his head again so she could no longer see his face. "They lead very lonely existences, each locked inside his own skull. Most of them never know anything else. They confuse physical closeness, emotional closeness, with mental closeness. And because they are forced to be individuals by their biology, what they seek is unity. Submergence into a mob mind, emotional closeness with a partner, identification with something greater than themselves. Most humans spend their lives eagerly trying to subsume their individuality into some sort of collective."

"I wouldn't say most humans..."

"I speak historically as well as based on the present day. Humans are far from perfect now, but even I have to admit they've come light-millenia from what they were even six measly centuries ago. My point, however, is not to gratuitously insult humans. You see, the Q have the exact opposite problem."

T'Laren released him. "Is that better?"

"Not really, but I don't think it's going to get better. You may as well not bother."

She walked around him and sat down again where she could watch his expression. "The opposite problem in what sense?"

"From the time we actually enter the Continuum-- which most of us don't do until we're fairly well developed already-- we are constantly in contact with the others. Our minds aren't really our own. We are-- I don't know how to describe it. You could call us interconnected nodes in a network, each node capable of independent thought, but the network forming the primary unit of experience. Or you could think of us... as diffuse semi-solids in a liquid solution. At our cores we are mostly one thing, but out at the boundaries... we are mostly others. I really don't know how to describe it."

"Can you describe the effect? Without resorting to analogies?"

"I can try... We're individuals. But our individuality is not our default, the way it is with humanity. We are first and foremost members of the Continuum, the overmind, the unity of all the Q... and secondarily we're ourselves. We _are_ part of something larger than ourselves, by definition. We can't escape it. And so what we seek is individuality. Separation from the others. Our... social connections, for lack of a better word, are conducted for different reasons than humans do. We don't _need_ reassurance that we're loved, that we're part of a larger whole, that we're important to others. All that we can take as a given. Most of our communication with one another-- all right, I'm talking about the adolescents. I can't speak for the older ones. They're as far above me-- as far above what I was as I was above you. But I'm speaking about the younger ones, like me, the ones that still bother to interact with the matter-based universe at all. And we communicate with each other to separate ourselves, not to draw ourselves closer." He leaned forward. "Do you see what I'm saying?"

"I do. Yes."

"Of course, we can send communications on multiple levels at once. We can simultaneously affirm our individuality, our dominance over another, our respect and love for that other, and our need for separation from that other with one thought. All our communication with one another is multi-layered, and only the most superficial level translates into human speech. And in that mode we're usually antagonistic toward one another. We have to be. A Q who doesn't have an overweening ego and an unshakably stubborn personality will be absorbed by the Continuum, diffused among all of us until he no longer exists as a separate entity. That's the only thing we have to fear. We can't die-- well, not unless the Continuum throws us out-- but we can cease to exist as individuals, which is more or less the same thing."

"But you call them your family."

"They _are_ my family. They were extensions of myself."

"Families are associated with closeness--"

"Forced closeness, T'Laren. Closeness that's taken for granted, until it becomes stultifying. You never had any siblings, did you?"

"No..."

"Sibling rivalry. Look it up sometime. It's the closest thing humans have to the relationship the younger Q have with one another." He sighed. "The trouble with analogies is that they oversimplify, of course. There's a lot I'm leaving out here, since I have no real words to express it. But I think you understand the basic idea."

T'Laren nodded slowly. "That's very helpful, actually. Thank you."

Q got up. "I think I need to rest for a while. I'm going to my room. You can call me for dinner whenever."

* * *

Q's strength slowly came back to him over the next several days, at least to the point where he wasn't getting winded by walking around. T'Laren, as promised, had continued to allow him some degree of control over his own activities, as long as he was reasonable about it. He was therefore trying to be reasonable. It was difficult-- he was well aware that he was being manipulated into behavior that suited T'Laren, and every instinct he had shrieked at him to refuse to be manipulated, whatever the cost to himself might be. But the cost would be far too high, in this case. He knew that, even if every so often he had to remind himself-- or, more usually, T'Laren had to remind him.

So he ate when she told him he had to-- which was getting easier; his appetite was improving, a good sign according to T'Laren-- and exercised when she told him to, despite the fact that any kind of physical activity embarrassed him and hurt like hell. He protested when he could. The damnable thing about Vulcans, though, was that they always had logical reasons why you had to do what they said.

For instance, when T'Laren demanded that Q let her teach him how to swim, he'd thought he had her. "What possible use could I have for learning to swim?" he'd asked, smugly sure there couldn't be any.

"It's valuable exercise. And it'll be less painful for you than calisthenics or other forms of physical activity."

"Less painful in your opinion. I'm not terribly fond of getting cold, or wet, or of breathing some medium other than an oxygen/nitrogen mixture."

"It may also be useful in a dangerous situation."

Now he had her. "I spend most of my time in space. And if I did go to the surface of a planet, rest assured I'd stay far away from the water. How could I possibly be in a situation where I would need to swim?"

"Suppose you were being chased by an assassin. You have no communicator and no vehicle--"

"Why am I on a planetary surface?"

"Say we were forced to make an emergency landing. I am nowhere around. Maybe I'm dead, maybe I'm injured. There's a Federation settlement on the other side of a river, and the assassin's slower than you are-- you could easily outrun it and reach the Federation colony if there weren't a river in your way. What are you going to do? Sit on the bank and whimper until the assassin catches up to you? Or try to swim the river?"

She was far too good at using logic against him. It just wasn't fair.

To make matters worse, she kept providing him with things that felt pleasant. After he complained about the swimming pool being cold, for instance, she had a small, shallow portion of it partitioned off and made into a hot bath. Li had prescribed hot baths for tension two and a half years ago, when Q had acquired his antique bathtub. Then Anderson had taken away the bathtub a year ago when he'd tried to kill himself in it. He hadn't been willing to admit quite how much he'd missed hot baths since. Now T'Laren could hold out the promise of a long warm soak if he cooperated with her and let her teach him swimming. It was classical carrot-and-stick training, and he should have been far too sophisticated for it to work. But it did, dammit. Even though he knew perfectly well what she was doing, he couldn't help responding to it.

Despite himself, he was actually beginning to trust her.

If he had thought that she was brainwashing him, or undermining his ability to take care of himself, he would have been able to resist. Q had spent millions of years fighting off attempts to undermine his identity or his self-will. That, he was sure he could resist. Short of euphoric drugs, no pleasure any mortal could give him could make him completely yield control of himself to someone else. But he had to admit that what she was doing was strengthening him. Though he ached from her exercise sessions, he did know that they were designed to help him protect himself, and that made the pain fractionally more bearable.

She was also training him in meditative techniques. To both of their surprise, Q took to meditation right away. It was less surprising in hindsight-- though a human with his personality would be utterly unsuited to meditative disciplines, the sort of intense inward concentration that humans used in meditation was analogous to a frequent state among the Q, and so in a certain respect it was something he was already an expert on doing. He just hadn't known he could apply his experience to his new state. And to a certain extent, of course, he could not. He could use a trance state to overcome boredom or mild discomfort, such as tense muscles; real pain, however, disrupted his concentration completely. T'Laren said it would be something he'd need to practice. "Your experience as an energy being doesn't apply when pain enters the picture. Don't be spoiled by how quickly you learned the techniques-- you'd never have managed it if you hadn't been learning something you already knew from your past life."

"So I might as well forget about learning to overcome pain."

"If you set your mind to it, you can probably eventually develop the ability to overcome most pain. Never all, but then, not even Vulcans can overcome all pain. It'll take you a long time, though."

"A long time" was meaningless to Q. He could look ahead a year, maybe two; beyond that, he truly didn't expect to live. Either he would be omnipotent again, in which case pain would be irrelevant, or he would be dead. His mind flinched away from exploring the possibilities of anything longer-range; a strange attitude, for a being who had once made plans in terms of millenia, but the idea of living eighty or ninety more years in this body frightened him almost as much as-- and sometimes more than-- the notion that he wouldn't. As far as he was concerned, then, if it would take what a Vulcan considered a long time, it was outside the realm of what he could hope for.

But even the little he could do was a vast improvement. When he started to feel paranoid again, to feel as if T'Laren was undermining his identity, he reminded himself of what she had given him. She had helped him to free himself from the tyranny of boredom; for that alone, he should fall at her feet and worship her. Someone who was trying to break him to her will wouldn't give him such a powerful tool of resistance.

Even still, he wouldn't be himself if he bent completely to another's will, and losing his identity had been his only real fear for far too long for him to put it aside now, even as a mortal with so many more relevant things to fear. There were still some areas where T'Laren was unyielding, such as the question of his sedatives. He had pleaded with her on several occasions, to no avail. It was T'Laren's opinion that he wouldn't have nightmares if he wasn't constantly trying to circumvent them with drugs.

"Explain then why I've had nightmares every night since I came aboard your starship," he challenged. They were sitting at dinner; in an hour or two, Q would probably go to bed, and he'd wanted to make one last try at getting his sedatives before he did. "Or why I had them every night that I didn't take sedatives back when I was stockpiling them."

T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "Why were you stockpiling sedatives?"

"I thought that Anderson would use them as some more ammunition to hold over my head."

"Is there a particular reason why you thought so?"

Q sighed theatrically. T'Laren seemed constitutionally incapable of giving a straight answer. Everything he asked her was an excuse for her to ask him questions. "She used everything else as ammunition; why not that?"

"Yes, but you must have perceived the danger as greater than usual, or you wouldn't have bothered. If your medical records are correct, you were permitted to replicate one sedative dose per night, is that right?"

"More or less."

"So in order to stockpile sedatives, you would have had to go without. Faced with a choice between certainly going without at the moment and possibly going without in the future, you would ordinarily have chosen the second alternative. The only reason you might have chosen a certainty over a possibility is if you considered that possibility almost a certainty itself. You must have been very sure that Anderson would do such a thing."

Put that way, it did seem like an unlikely thing for him to have done-- planning ahead hadn't been Q's strong point since he became mortal. "I first started it after Li said I couldn't have painkillers anymore except in an emergency. I was afraid he'd cut my prescription. Then I tried to get Anderson to get Li to give me the painkillers back-- I told her I couldn't concentrate on my work if I was in pain. She said she wasn't going to override the chief medical officer's decision on a medical matter, and maybe I should learn to overcome minor discomforts. When I said I couldn't, she said I'd have to learn to overcome boredom, then. She was always trying to blackmail me into doing things."

"Into doing your job, was my understanding," T'Laren said.

"I made an agreement with Starfleet," Q snapped. "They would protect me, and I'd teach anyone they sent to me. Well, they fell down on their side of it a good number of times, too. Did Anderson tell you about the time that Security tried to kill me? Or about the six or seven times that various assassins got through the base's security and nearly finished me off? Did she by any chance mention the time that a telepath simply walked up to me and stabbed me in the gut, when there was an entire security escort around me-- after I'd _warned_ her to use telepathic security to protect me? She claimed that she couldn't get hold of psis on short notice, that we would have to make do with a handful of Vulcans and a human 'sensitive'. Sensitive as a rock! _He_ didn't do me any good."

T'Laren's eyes widened slightly. "No, she didn't tell me anything of the sort," she said. "What happened?"

"Well... you've seen mention of the Maierlen assassin in my records."

She nodded, sipping at fruit juice. "The one who tried to kill you with a swarm of insects."

Q had been asleep, deep under the influence of his nightly drug, when a sudden pain had started to rouse him. Since he'd been sedated, it took two or three more of the sharp, stinging pains before he could come fully awake. There was an unpleasant crawling sensation on his skin, vaguely similar to what he'd felt when the Calamarain was attacking him. He had commanded the lights on, and seen three or four Maierlen waspoids, thick-bodied stinging insects that looked like a cross between Earth cockroaches and Earth wasps, crawling on him. There were several more of the bugs crawling on the sheets, making their way to him, and one or two flying at him. Since a starbase was normally a sanitary, vermin-free place, he had immediately known something was terribly wrong. He'd looked up at the air vent-- and seen a swarm of the creatures boiling out, the air churning and black with them.

He had screamed for help the moment he saw the swarm; even still, by the time Security reached him he was more than half-dead, covered with stings and with insects crawling over every centimeter of his skin. Before that time, Q had had none of the normal human revulsion toward insects-- they were simply another form of life, no more repulsive than humans themselves. Since then, he had developed a powerful phobia of bugs and buglike things, as if the atavistic repulsion had been lurking in his human genes, waiting for circumstance to activate it.

"Right," he said, trying to dispel the memory. "Natives of the planet Maierle are powerful telepaths, who generally exist in symbiosis with some animal partner-- a familiar, to use terms from Earth mythos. Normally Maierlen familiars are mammalian, and single animals; however, Maierlen assassins frequently employ entire swarms of insectoid or aquatic lifeforms as their familiars. I knew it was a Maierlen that was after me the moment I saw the insects; I also knew that he had to have used his telepathy to get himself and his bugs aboard, as the automatic defenses would've caught him if he tried to beam aboard secretly. He had to have walked in the front door, and just made everyone think that he wasn't smuggling a crate full of poisonous insects aboard."

"And so you told Anderson...?"

"I told her there was a dangerous telepath at large who wanted me dead and who could convince anyone without telepathic defenses-- which covered 99% of the starbase's personnel, including me-- that he wasn't there. She seemed to think the threat was negligible after we killed his bugs. I begged her to call in telepaths-- send to Betazed or Vulcan, there'd be tons. Instead, she figured we'd make do with six or seven Vulcans and the 'sensitive', Agajanian." Q shook his head. "The assassin took out Agajanian-- apparently his 'sensitivity' wasn't quite up to snuff-- and made everyone think he _was_ Agajanian. Even Sekal was fooled. T'Meth might not have been-- Sekal says she's a better telepath than he is-- but she and the other Vulcans were off combing the base for the guy. And in the middle of a security escort, the assassin walked up to me and cut me open, because no one could see him for what he was until he attacked me."

"I see."

The memory of the incident-- his helpless fury when Anderson refused to take his advice, thus dooming him; his terror in the split-second before the knife went in, as the Maierlen dropped his illusion and let Q see what was about to happen to him-- reawakened rage at Anderson. Q stood up and began to pace. "You see what I was up against, all the time. Anderson had promised Starfleet she'd protect me, and failed miserably. She wasn't imcompetent; she'd never have gotten to where she was if she was, so what does that leave me to believe? If Anderson wanted me dead, if she couldn't be bothered keeping up her end of things, why should I whore for her? Why should I waste my time, which I now have precious little of, trying to teach the morons Starfleet would send me, putting on a vaudeville show to catch their microscopic attention spans and get the simplest concepts across to them, when Anderson couldn't be bothered to keep me from getting eviscerated in public?"

T'Laren studied him for a few moments. "I see your point," she finally said. "In Anderson's defense, I think she did the best she could, for the most part; there may have been some reason she couldn't get more telepaths on short notice. She may have become entangled with some petty bureaucratic nonsense at Starfleet Command, and then presented their decision to you as her own out of loyalty to them. But certainly, with solely the information you've given me, it seems reasonable to believe that Anderson wasn't doing her job properly."

"So if she didn't do her job, why should I do mine? Only it didn't work that way, you see, because she had the power and I didn't. Anything I depended on, Anderson would take great glee in cutting me off from if I did the slightest thing she didn't like. I wanted to have my own supply of sedatives so if she _did_ cut me off, I could laugh in her face without worrying about the nightmares I'd have. And then we were working against the Borg, and I wasn't sleeping, most nights. And the nights I did, I couldn't afford to take a sedative. So whenever I thought of it, I'd get the computer to give me a sedative and then I'd stockpile it. They had about a three-month life span; I had something like thirty of them that were still good the night I took them all." He was growing more and more angry, as he remembered the increasingly severe restrictions that he'd been living under for over two years. "And then they did cut me off. I had to go to sickbay every night to get the damn things; do you think I enjoyed that? Especially after Security attacked me and I wasn't allowed to go anywhere without an escort? And explain to me the logic of _that_\-- Security tried to kill Q, so let's not let him go anywhere without Security. Oh, that certainly makes sense. I didn't take the sedatives when I thought Security was going to kill me, since I didn't want to be asleep if they came for me, and I had utterly horrific nightmares constantly throughout that period. It just never fails. I always have nightmares unless I take the sedatives."

T'Laren shook her head. "Q, it seems to me that every time you haven't taken the sedatives, you've been under some unusually severe emotional stress. Right now, you've left behind a place where you were reasonably secure and embarked into the unknown, certainly a stressful situation. The other occasions you describe-- fearing you would be blackmailed, fearing you would be killed, fearing the Borg... I know of few humans that wouldn't suffer nightmares under such circumstances. My point is that, if you learn to cope with the nightmares, rather than drugging yourself to avoid them, they will lessen in severity and eventually drop to a bearable level. Even human beings in conditions of chronic stress rarely suffer nightmares as consistently as you do; I think that's because you don't actually suffer nightmares as consistently as you claim."

Q turned on T'Laren, startled. "You think I'm lying to you?"

"No, no. You must realize that you dream every night, even under sedation. It's simply that when you are sedated, you sleep through the dreams, and don't remember them in the morning. You understand that, correct?"

"Uh-- yes, I suppose so..."

"In the first place, you have conditioned yourself to fear sleep. When you sleep without a sedative, you expect to have a nightmare, and so you have one. The fact that you are usually under stress when you go without sedatives intensifies the conditioning. In fact, you probably have nightmares rarely-- mostly only when you're not sedated. The dreams you normally have, the ones you don't remember, are ordinary dreams, without significant negative emotional content. If you stop taking the sedatives completely, your body will gradually become accustomed to the absence of sedative, and the conditioning will wear off."

It sounded unlikely at best to Q, but T'Laren was adamant. So he had stopped trying to persuade her, and was approaching the problem from a different direction. _Ketaya_'s computer system was considerably less sophisticated than Starbase 56's. Actually, less sophisticated wasn't precisely accurate; many of its AI-style functions were far more sophisticated, since it was designed to be able to run the entire ship itself with only minimal humanoid input, if need be. But its security was laughable in comparison to the starbase's. Around the ninth day of their journey, Q managed to get the computer to recognize him as an authorized ship pilot, with all the same rights and privileges that T'Laren had. Using that status, he rewrote the restrictions list on his replicator so he could get anything he really wanted, including sedatives. He had written in a protection subroutine so that T'Laren would be notified if he got an overdose out of the replicators-- she had had a point, that he needed to be protected from himself to some degree-- but he figured he could take his nightly doses without her ever finding out.

It gave him a small sense of triumph, to have pulled one over on her like that. He had begun to genuinely like T'Laren-- no big surprise there; as long as he wasn't gratitutiously obnoxious to her, she was consistently good to him, without being sappy or overemotional like Medellin had been. She would match wits with him when he threw down a challenge, and seemed to understand the difference between verbal sparring for pleasure and serious combat, something few people had ever grasped before. Her intentions were to help him, and he'd come to realize that she was reasonably competent at her job-- unlike Medellin, who hadn't understood him at all, she could perhaps carry through her intentions. But Q was incapable of letting anyone else dominate him. As much as he'd begun to trust her, he needed to have something over her, and the fact that he now had as much access to her computer as she did would do nicely.

He also spent a great deal of time exploring the ship. There were crawlspaces and hatchways, ventilation systems and access corridors, running under the surface of the decks and behind the bulkheads. On Starbase 56, he had once grown sufficiently bored with the restricted area he was allowed to travel freely in that he had climbed into the accessways and explored them thoroughly. That knowledge had saved his life once. It stood to reason that it might again, so he wanted to be sure he knew _Ketaya_ thoroughly. He was not particularly well-suited to crawlspaces at his size, but he considered it important to do it. T'Laren didn't know about his explorations, and while he doubted that she would forbid them, or that she could come up with a sufficiently logical reason for forbidding him that he would listen to her, he preferred not to tell her. Q needed secrets, and he was spending far too much time revealing his to T'Laren. He had to make new secrets, to replace the ones he'd lost.

Unfortunately, T'Laren had a habit of getting secrets out of him, one way or another.

* * *

Q was not normally in the habit of oversleeping, if only because he preferred to be fully dressed and alert by the time T'Laren showed up to wake him. It was the tenth day of their journey, long enough that they'd fallen into a somewhat regular pattern. When it was half an hour later than his usual time for coming to breakfast, and still there was no sign of him, T'Laren began to get worried. She touched her combadge. "Q?"

There was no answer. "Computer, Q's status."

"Q is asleep in his quarters."

T'Laren frowned slightly. The computer would have told her if it had detected anything unusual about that sleep. Perhaps he was simply overtired. On the other hand, there were a potentially infinite number of reasons why the computer might not be able to detect some sort of attack on him. She decided to check.

When he didn't respond to the door chime, she palmed the door open and went in. He didn't respond to a knock at his bedroom door, either. Now T'Laren was starting to become alarmed. She went into the bedroom and walked quickly to the bed.

There appeared to be nothing wrong with Q, except for the fact that he was asleep. He had told her he was a light sleeper, and indeed he had always responded directly to her calls before, even when the call had just woken him up. Yet here he was, asleep still after several calls, a door chime, a knock at the door and with an intruder in his room. If T'Laren had been an assassin that had managed to slip in, he wouldn't have had a chance.

It was something of a cliché that humans looked vulnerable when they slept, and there Q was no exception. The force of his personality minimized his physical frailty when he was awake; asleep, he looked terribly fragile, as if the slightest burden on him would snap his thin frame. It was also a cliché that sleeping humans looked peaceful, however, and that one Q did not live up to. He was curled up in a semi-fetal position, arms and legs positioned to protect as much of his body as possible. Even in sleep he seemed somehow tense, frightened, as if he knew how vulnerable he was. T'Laren raised an eyebrow. If Q was this tense when he slept, no wonder he had nightmares.

Of course, if he was this tense, he should be a phenomenally light sleeper, once more begging the question of why he was still asleep. She knelt by the side of the bed. "Q? Can you hear me?"

"Mmm."

That was an improvement. T'Laren took out her tricorder and ran it over him, wondering if illness could explain his lethargy.

The results were unmistakable, but she ran the scan twice more anyway, just to be sure. She was no medical doctor, but as a counselor she was thoroughly familiar with the effects of all sorts of drugs on the human body. Q wasn't waking up because he was heavily sedated. Genuinely annoyed, she reached out and shook him roughly. "Q!"

He blinked his eyes open groggily and scowled at her. "...wha...?"

"You are tremendously fortunate that I'm not an assassin," T'Laren said sharply. "I called you several times, and you didn't respond. I could have stumbled over every piece of furniture you own and still you wouldn't have awakened. How did you bypass your replicator restrictions?"

Q blinked at her several more times. He then rolled over on his stomach, pulling the blankets over his head. "Go 'way," he mumbled.

T'Laren yanked the blankets off him and off the bed. She then unceremoniously removed the pillow and dropped it on the floor. By now Q was glaring at her. "Wake up and answer me," she snapped.

"Coffee," he muttered. "Serious coffee."

"No coffee. How did you bypass the replicator restrictions?"

"Get me a coffee and I'll consider answering you."

"Answer me and I'll consider letting you have coffee."

Q sat up slowly, rubbing his eyes. "Replicator, coffee."

"Override, replicator."

"Computer, code byzantium. Vulcans should be seen and not heard. And make me a coffee."

The replicator produced a coffee. T'Laren retrieved it before Q could grab it. "What do you mean, 'code byzantium'? What have you done to my computers, Q?"

"Locked you out of them. Give me my coffee and I'll let you back in."

T'Laren fought to master a stab of genuine fear. _Ketaya_ was completely dependent on its computers, and T'Laren was no computer expert. If Q had locked her out of the computer system, she was completely at his mercy. "Computer, give me current system status."

There was no answer. Q crossed his arms and smiled smugly. "Now are you going to let me have my coffee?"

The immediate reaction to an attempted power game, according to the teachings of Surak, should be to refuse to play. For a moment, T'Laren retreated within herself, quickly weighing her options. She had mishandled this-- her refusal to let Q have his coffee had been born of anger, not reason. Stupid of her. She could never let Q get her angry, because when she was angry she tended to behave autocratically, and any sort of coercion brought out Q's stubbornness in full flower. Doubly foolish, because it had never occurred to her that Q could get himself in a position of power over her. She should have asked Lhoviri for computers with Starfleet-level security on them, should have made sure there was no way Q could get the upper hand. She ran through her memories of Q's files, of the sort of behavior he'd indulged in when he had power. It was not encouraging.

Silently she placed the coffee on a shelf, neither holding onto it nor handing it to him. Demanding that he restore her computer access would only worsen the problem. She retreated deep into a Vulcan shell and waited to see what he would do.

Q got up and took the coffee, then sat back down again and sipped at it. "Really, T'Laren. How long did you think you could keep me helpless? This is hardly a starbase. Cracking _Ketaya_'s security codes was child's play."

So far he had not threatened. She would therefore give him the benefit of the doubt, and behave as if nothing had changed. "How long did it take you?"

"About a week to get into the system. I finished getting around those silly restrictions last night. If you refused to let me have a sedative, I thought I had better take matters into my own hands."

"I have explained my reasons. This incident provides additional reason. You slept far too deeply. If an assassin had gotten in here, you would have had no opportunity to call for help."

Q shrugged. "I miscalculated the dosage. I forgot that I've been off them for over a week. It won't happen again."

"I would have thought that you of all people, with your fear of being dominated, would avoid a drug dependence as much as possible."

Q shook his head, sipping his coffee. "I'm not addicted, T'Laren. I am perfectly capable of getting to sleep without sedatives; I'm simply utterly miserable when I do so. If it's important enough-- as it was during the preparation for the Borg invasion, for instance-- I can voluntarily choose not to take them."

"Victims of drug addiction always say they can quit at any time."

"No, no. I didn't say I could quit at any time. I said I _have_ quit, when it was important enough, for periods of over two months at a time. This is proven, recorded fact. I don't want sedatives because I'm addicted to them; I want them because I sleep terribly without them." He smiled again, nastily. "I think you're just upset because I got around your attempt to dominate me."

"I have never tried to dominate you."

"Perhaps that isn't what you call it. Perhaps you call it 'maintaining a proper patient-therapist relationship', or some such. But I assure you, T'Laren, I am an expert on hierarchical dominance patterns among mortals, and you have been trying to dominate me. All the while telling yourself it was for my own good, I'm sure. In fact, I'm positive that you _believe_ everything you do is for my own good. But occasionally, you are wrong. And since you insist on trying to dominate me, you force me to measures like this to convince you that you're wrong."

"In order to prevent me from dominating you, you are forced to try to dominate me?"

Q ignored the sarcasm, his smile broadening. "And you don't like it, do you? You don't like having someone else in control of your life."

That was definitely a threat. T'Laren shook her head. "You are not in control of my life."

"No? You know what _Ketaya_'s defenses are capable of, and you know that they're controlled entirely through the computers. There are quick-acting gaseous drugs that act on Vulcans only, you know. There's any number of things I could do to you."

"You could," T'Laren said calmly.

"And that doesn't make you afraid? You don't fear what I might do?"

He studied her face, openly looking for signs of weakness. T'Laren showed him none. "Your fate is inextricably bound to mine," she said. "As we have discussed on previous occasions. If you are short-sighted enough to hurt me, and thus destroy your only hope, I cannot stop you."

Q stared at her for a second or so, and then smiled wryly, shaking his head. "I should have known better," he said. "Computer! Be kind to your pointy-eared friends. Authorization Unlimited Ducks."

T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "What now?"

"I've restored your access." The wry smile returned. "I was always willing to be an equal partner with you, T'Laren. I just don't want you dominating _me_."

She tested it. "Computer, travel status."

"We are traveling warp six toward the Abister system. Rendezvous with the _Yamato_ will take place nine days from now."

T'Laren nodded once, slowly, acknowledging her victory.

"You're very good at this, you know," Q said. He got up and walked over to the replicator. "Another coffee, this one with more sweetener than I can possibly stand."

"Clarify, please," the replicator said. "How much sweetener can you stand?"

T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "You've done more than rewrite the access list. You've altered some of the programming, too."

"Some," Q admitted. "I could stand about two lumps of sugar, I suppose. Make it two and a half."

"I would have thought you would have indeed known better by now," T'Laren said. "What did you hope to accomplish?"

"By rewriting the programming?"

T'Laren merely looked at him. Q made a "you-can't-blame-me-for-trying" shrug, smiling somewhat embarrassedly. "All right, then. Not much, to be honest. I wanted you to know what it was like, to be at someone else's mercy like that."

"What makes you think I didn't already know?"

Abruptly his expression turned serious. "And I wanted you to stop acting like I'm some sort of child, that I'm too ignorant to make decisions on my own welfare. Essentially I want you to stop trying to control me."

"I have not been trying to control you, Q. I've been trying to help you. And if your solution to being treated as a child is to engage in childish behavior, then you _are_ a child, and deserve to be treated as one."

"You really believe that? That you haven't been trying to control me?" He sipped at the second coffee, his eyes hooded.

It wasn't true, strictly speaking. She _had_ been trying to control him, to some extent, for good reasons. T'Laren considered whether or not he was rational enough at the moment to speak to sensibly.

"The difficulty is the word 'control'," she said. "You have a pronounced allergy to anyone attempting to impose their will on you. I understand this. But at the moment, Q, you are your own greatest enemy. You are astonishingly short-sighted, seeking instant gratification at the expense of long-range happiness. You are subconsciously self-destructive. I understand that it's difficult for you to let another person guide you-- all your life experience counsels against it-- but your self-guidance is obviously not working properly. Right now, you can trust me better than you can trust yourself."

"In other words, yes. You have been trying to control me. Admit it."

She did not quite sigh. "You're being irrational."

"I'm being very rational. You're jumping to conclusions." He put down the coffee cup and began to pace. "I feel like the boy who cried wolf. Yes, I've tried to kill myself, fairly recently. Yes, I've done a lot of things that, if one were observing the situation objectively, one could say were probably self-destructive or short-sighted. But I'm not being self-destructive now, and as for being short-sighted... it's a common failing of tightrope walkers. I need to focus all my attention on what's right under my feet; if I try to look forward too far, I'll lose my balance, and fall. T'Laren, I'm not going to be alive long enough to _worry_ about the long run."

"You don't know that."

"It's almost a statistical certainty." He faced her. "In the past three years, my life has been threatened some twenty-odd times. That makes about once every six weeks or so. My body is physiologically in its 30's, and humans who die of old age do so nowadays around 120, so I can expect about 90 more years of this. If I faced death twenty times in three years, I will have done so six hundred times in 90 years. About a third of those times will involve grievous bodily harm, if the extrapolation holds up. Do you truly think anyone can survive two hundred beatings, stabbings, poisonings and stranglings?" Q shook his head. "I've been lucky so far, T'Laren. I'm not going to stay that lucky. I expect I'll last another two years or so, at most."

"The statistical extrapolation is not necessarily an accurate one; I would imagine that most of the beings with sufficient power to determine that you'd been made mortal, and to find you, would do so very quickly. If you live for ten more years, by that time perhaps everyone who remembers you and cares sufficiently to hunt you down would have tried already."

"At which point maybe they'll repeat. Already the Mirou have attacked twice."

"Even still, it is not necessarily valid to assume that events will continue for 90 years in the same fashion that they have done in the past three. And even if they do... all the more reason why you must learn to defend yourself, and not leave yourself a vulnerability like an addiction to sedatives."

"I'm _not--_" He caught himself before he started shouting, and took an ostentatious deep breath. "T'Laren, I just woke up. I am still parading around in my pajamas, I haven't had breakfast yet, and I look terrible. Why don't we continue this discussion in half an hour or so, after I've had a chance to turn myself into some semblance of a social being?"

T'Laren considered a second. Though the request sounded superficially like a stalling mechanism or a strategic retreat, she didn't think it was-- Q wasn't close enough to beaten to be stalling. She nodded. "That's reasonable."

* * *

It was important to remain calm. If he started shouting at her, he'd undermine his own argument. He would also have to try to hold back from clever twists of wordplay. Being reasonable was the key. T'Laren was a Vulcan-- she had to respond to reason.

She was waiting for him in the kitchen, calmly sitting in a chair with hands folded in her lap, watching him. Q ignored her for a minute or two as he got himself breakfast. It was undignified to argue while one was eating, and he wanted to be as calm and dignified as possible, so he rushed through the meal, aware of T'Laren's eyes on him.

"You don't have to eat so quickly," she said. "I'm willing to wait."

He scowled at her, annoyed that she would call attention to what he was doing. "Don't worry about it. I'm almost done."

When he'd finished, he was still mildly hungry, but his own patience wouldn't hold out. There was a debate to be gotten to, and that took priority. He straightened up, made his expression as calm as possible, and faced T'Laren.

"The point I wished to make, before we got sidetracked onto a discussion of my probable lifespan, is this. I am capable of being short-sighted and self-destructive, yes. But I'm also capable of being reasonable, and I have been trying, very hard, to be reasonable. I've let you direct me into all sorts of things that I didn't want to do, because you gave me a convincing logical argument why the benefits I'd get would outweigh what I'd have to put up with to get them. So far, you haven't given me a sufficiently convincing argument regarding the sedatives, and I am no longer willing to let you have the kind of power over me where you can just say something and I have to do it."

She studied him for several seconds. "Was an attempt to humiliate me a necessary component of your claim on this power?"

Q sighed. "I wasn't _actually_ going to do anything to you."

"Your past record would have implied otherwise."

"You're saying you don't think I've changed? That I'd go out of my way to humiliate you just because I had the power to do it?"

"Your statements earlier, when you believed you had the upper hand, implied that you would."

"I was trying to scare you," he snapped, exasperated, and then forced himself to calm down. Reasonable. Be very reasonable. "T'Laren, I knew perfectly well I couldn't actually have done a damn thing to you. If I'd pushed you far enough, you could easily have overpowered me physically. We don't have any Vulcan-only knockout gases that could act before you could have strangled me. I wanted you to admit that you were afraid of what I might do-- I was trading on my reputation there a bit, I'll admit-- and then I would have given you your access back. You didn't make me see reason-- you called my bluff."

"Why was it important to you that I be afraid of you?"

He shrugged. "I didn't say I'd changed _that_ much."

"Ah."

"But that's not the point." Q leaned forward. "Look, I'm sorry about that, all right? I wanted to frighten you to get you back for throwing me in the airlock two weeks ago. Not the loveliest of motives, I admit, but I swear I had no intention of actually hurting you. I mean, I wouldn't have actually hurt you even if I hadn't known you could have physically disabled me. I didn't even _want_ to hurt you. I just..." He felt as if he was babbling, but she was staring at him. He had to say something to make her stop staring like that. "I'm just so tired of always being the one that has to be afraid."

"If you wish me to treat you as a reasonable being, it would be best if you would refrain from the petty little revenge ploys in the future."

He nodded. "All right. That's fair. I just... T'Laren, I want to be an equal partner in this. I've been living under conditions of increasing restriction for three years now. You got me out here by promising to give me control over my own life. If you weren't going to do that, I might as well be on Starbase 56. So..."

"So you took matters into your own hands."

"I have the abilities. I might as well use them. It took me a lot of work to achieve my current level of expertise with computers, and it's something I feel I have the right to be genuinely proud of. Technology was never a major interest of mine when I was still omniscient-- all I could really carry over was a knowledge of the physical laws technology is based on. What I've done, I've done the long, boring, human way, and I've done it successfully. So why shouldn't I use what I've learned?"

T'Laren's expression softened, very slightly. "Q. You don't need to be so defensive, really," she said, the first gentleness entering her voice since the conversation began. She unfolded from her aloofly watching pose and leaned across the table slightly, placing her hands on the surface. "I was not criticizing you for giving yourself access to the computers-- I can certainly understand why you did it. But you realize that it creates problems. You are not always capable of determining what is best for you."

"So explain to me. I told you, I can be reasonable. If you can give me a rational logical reason why I need to do something--"

"You still won't necessarily do it. I have been explaining to you repeatedly why you shouldn't take sedatives. Yet that was the first thing that you did."

"Because you don't know what you're talking about." He barely kept from snapping at her. "You keep insisting that I'm addicted to sedatives. I'm caught in a Catch-22 here-- my telling you that I'm not addicted is apparently being used as evidence that I am. If I ask you if you're addicted to sedatives, and you say no, that's hardly evidence that you are."

"What a person who is addicted to drugs says about the state of their addiction is irrelevant."

"But I'm _not_ addicted!" This had to be one of the most frustrating arguments he'd had in some time. T'Laren was refusing to see reason. He took a deep breath, marshalling the next plan of attack. The story of the iolera was deeply embarrassing, not anything he'd have chosen to share with her if he felt he'd had a choice, but right now he judged it his only hope. "Let me tell you a little story, T'Laren, so you know I know what I'm talking about. All right?"

"By all means." T'Laren leaned back and folded her hands in her lap expectantly.

He stood up and began to pace around the room, trying to pick a place to start that would show him in the best possible light. "This was, I don't know, maybe a year and a half ago or so. It was after we defeated the Borg, and after they put me on medical restriction. And on this particular occasion, I really did not feel well. I was supposed to be talking to a group of scientists, and with the exception of an Andorian named Thelkas they were all potato heads. My head was killing me, I was in no mood to deal with these morons, and wonderful Dr. Li refused to let me have a painkiller. He said the problem was tension and I should exercise. Well, that's all very nice for the long run, but in the short run that would have made the problem worse, and I needed something for my headache right then."

"Perhaps you should have taken up the exercise some time previously. If you had thought ahead..."

"Right, right. But I didn't. As I've said before, it's difficult to think ahead when one has a hard time imagining surviving to the end of the week. So I was... um... not on my best behavior."

"I can imagine."

"And most of the laughingly so-called 'physicists' I was talking to... There's a difficulty with the fact that my reputation precedes me. I'm sure it never entered their tuber-like minds that I didn't feel well. When one goes to question the oracle, does it ever occur to one that the oracle could be having a bad day? They seemed to treat me as if I were some legendary hazard of space, that if they successfully braved the Scylla and Charybdis of Starbase 56 they could return to their homes with the booty of knowledge. It's an occupational hazard of being a valuable resource-- people treat me as if I'm nothing but a resource, as if I don't have any feelings of my own." He was getting more and more upset, remembering. "Anyway, when Thelkas-- who was considerably less of a vegetable brain than the others anyway-- showed me some personal consideration, I may have blown it a trifle out of proportion."

"In what way?"

She had to ask that. "Um... Well, he asked me if I was all right, that I didn't seem to feel well. And I... entertained him with a lengthy description of the foibles of humanity, Dr. Li in particular, the follies of Thelkas' fellow scientists, and the difficulty of holding a coherent conversation when there are high explosives going off behind one's eyes every so often. So he offered to see if he could do anything for me. I expected him to try to intercede with Anderson or something."

"I take it he did something else."

"Oh yes." Q's expression became grim as he remembered. He had trusted Thelkas, naive and desperate in his pain. "You've read about this in my files?"

"So far none of this story is ringing a bell. I don't recall a Thelkas mentioned in your file."

"All right, then. Thelkas came to me the next day, offering to give me an Andorian herbal painkiller that, according to him, was nontoxic and highly effective on humans. He claimed that he carried the stuff on him, that it was a traditional Andorian remedy for practically everything, and that he would have given it to me yesterday but he'd wanted to check his computer for its effects on humans first." Q leaned against the wall and put a hand to his head, half-covering his face. This was the embarrassing part. "You have to understand-- I wasn't thinking clearly, my head hurt terribly, and everyone else was treating me like a walking database. Thelkas was the only person who seemed to be paying any attention to my feelings. Sometimes... I can be very vulnerable to that."

"It was poisonous?"

"Depends on how you look at it. It _was_ a highly effective painkiller. Ever hear of iolera root?"

Both T'Laren's eyebrows went up. "Yes."

Iolera root-- Q had found out later, after what had happened-- was in fact a traditional Andorian remedy for practically everything. On Andorians, it acted as a mild painkiller and muscle relaxant, producing a feeling of calm and well-being. On humans, it was something else entirely. "You probably know that you can't get iolera aboard a Starfleet vessel unless you're medical personnel. But Thelkas came on an Andorian vessel, a small science ship, and aboard an Andorian vessel you can get iolera about as easily as you can get synthehol in Starfleet. So he got the stuff on his ship and gave it to me... and, in an unparelleled fit of idiocy, I took it without checking its effects for myself."

T'Laren's eyes were wide. "What happened?"

"What you might expect." Q sat down. "Or maybe not-- actually, the story's a bit more complicated than what you might expect. As one can imagine, I became quite deliriously happy as soon as that stuff hit my system. Thelkas suggested that I go to his ship with him, where he would give me another dose, and I thought that sounded like a marvelous idea. He came very close to walking out with me under Security's noses-- Thelkas, like most of the scientists who came to see me, was a respected scholar and had been through a number of security checks. There was no connection between him and anyone who might want me dead. Also, we were checking for shapeshifters by then, after the incident with the Ceulan shapechanger back in my fifth month on the base or so. There was no reason for anyone to believe he presented a danger to me, so he wasn't watched as heavily as, say, the Klingons were."

"Oh." T'Laren nodded. "The incident _is_ in your files; I recall it now. The record simply states that a scientist drugged and attempted to kidnap you; it didn't give his race or name. Or that the drug was iolera. I'd been thinking it was a sleep drug or a paralytic of some sort."

"No. It was considerably worse." He shivered slightly, remembering. "I had no will at all. I would have done anything Thelkas told me to-- after all, he was such a wonderful person who'd given me such happiness. Actually, not even that. I would have done anything _anyone_ told me to. I was madly in love with the entire universe, and if someone had suggested that it might be fun for me to walk out an airlock, I would probably have cheerfully done so. Which was why I cooperated, when Security rescued me and took me to sickbay-- it didn't enter my mind that they were going to take the happiness away. I couldn't entertain any sort of frightening thought-- it was as if I was suddenly living in a universe where bad things didn't happen anymore. Not even that I was invulnerable again-- _everyone_ was invulnerable, because nothing bad could happen."

The memories disturbed and frightened him, but he could no longer let them go. "And then they gave me the antidote... and I became a raving madman, screaming at them to let me go. All I wanted was to run back to Thelkas and get him to give me another dose. It was all I could think about-- for _three days_. I _wanted_ to be enslaved again. I fought for it, I begged for it. They had to put me in a restraining field, because I kept trying to get free to go back to Thelkas, and they were afraid I'd hurt myself." He broke his inward focus and looked at T'Laren, leaning forward slightly. "Do you know what that's like? For someone like me, who's fought to preserve the integrity of his own will for _millions_ of _years_, to be broken like that? I would have done anything for the privilege of being made a slave again. Can you _imagine_ how it feels to know I'm that weak?"

"Did they ever learn why Thelkas did it?"

"Oh, that was easy. After they caught him, he tried to protest that he hadn't known the drug would have that effect on me, that he was trying to get me to his ship for treatment so no one would find out his mistake... but Thelkas wasn't a very good liar. They eventually got the real story out of him." He smiled bitterly. "It's almost funny, really. Thelkas was one of these people who worships knowledge. He'd been looking forward to getting to talk to me for months, and he was angry at the fact that I was being 'wasted'-- that unworthy people were allowed to take up my time, that I wasn't being handled properly. He wanted to hide me away where he and people he deemed intelligent enough to be worthy would have unlimited access to me, and he planned to use considerably stronger methods than the Federation used to make sure I did what I was told. Doses of iolera as rewards, direct neural stimulation of the pain centers as punishment... the man who I thought was the only one who treated me as a sentient being perceived me as a commodity far more than anyone else." Q shuddered, looking down. "I don't have much pain resistance, but I like to think I have a strong will for a human being... I always thought it would be difficult to really break me. I could be forced to talk out of fear easily enough, but to be broken to the point where I'd voluntarily aid my captors, where I'd seek their approval... I never thought that could be done. And then they told me what Thelkas had been planning to do to me, what I'd wanted so much to run back to. He could have broken me completely inside two weeks." He closed his eyes, his hands clenching almost unconsciously.

"And there was no indication in Thelkas' record that he was capable of such a thing? People willing to kidnap and enslave other sentient beings do not usually have normal psychological profiles."

Q laughed bitterly. "Oh, there was nothing wrong with Thelkas' morals. He wouldn't have dreamed of doing such a thing to a real human being. No, it was a matter of definition. Thelkas had some convoluted argument about why I didn't deserve the same rights as other sentients-- I think it was something based on reciprocity, that my species denied the rights of other sentients and therefore forfeited any rights of our own. He'd had no dealings with anyone who knew me when, I'd never done a thing to him personally-- he was simply arguing from philosophy." He shook his head. "In a way that made it even more horrible. I'd placed my trust in someone who considered me to have fewer inalienable rights than an animal."

"That must have been horrible," T'Laren said gently.

He nodded emphatically. "Why do you think I didn't want to tell you the story?" The embarrassment of his own stupidity overwhelmed him, and he had to fight the urge to shudder again. "It was bad enough to know I could be broken like that, but... much as I despise the fact, I've learned that my body does have an impact on my mind. It's horrifying, that a drug could rob me of my will that way, but it's a hazard of being mortal that I simply have to live with. I could have dealt with that alone. But... how could I have been idiotic enough to trust Thelkas? Someone has only to be nice to me for a few hours to have me eating out of their hand? What was _wrong_ with me? I know better than that!"

T'Laren's voice was very quiet, and somehow sad. "Are you trying to tell me that you feel you cannot afford to trust me? That you fear I might turn out to be another Thelkas?"

Q blinked in surprise. It had never occurred to him that she might put that interpretation on things, though now that she'd said it he could see why she thought so. "No-- no. That isn't it at all. T'Laren, I assure you, I'd never have gone with you if I thought for a moment you might turn out to be like Thelkas. No, that isn't the point of this story at all."

"Then perhaps I'm missing something?"

"The point is that I know what it's like to be addicted, T'Laren. When I tell you that I'm not addicted to sedatives, it's with full knowledge of what addiction is. I was lucky that I couldn't get access to iolera root-- even after the first day or so was over, and I stopped behaving like such a lunatic, I would have done anything to get another dose. I require sedatives as medication for a chronic condition of insomnia, not as a fix I need. I can go without when I have to; I've done so for periods of up to two months, as I've said. Can't you see the difference between this and an addiction?"

For a few moments T'Laren was silent. Q studied her, trying to see what she was thinking, if she was showing any sign of relenting. Of course, now he was in a position where it didn't matter that much what T'Laren thought-- he could override any restrictions she put on him-- but he didn't want to do it that way. He wanted her to agree with him.

"I think you misunderstand," she finally said. "I am willing to concede your point that you may not be physically addicted to sedatives. You are, however, dependent on them. They're a chemical crutch that you don't need. Your problem is psychological, not even psychophysiological but purely a function of mind. And it is a bad idea to treat psychological problems chemically. We should be attacking the cause, not the symptom."

He stared at her in disbelief. "And how are we supposed to do that?" he asked harshly. "I have nightmares because I'm unhappy. Even if you're capable of helping me out of my depression, which I doubt, it's going to take an awfully long time. Am I supposed to go without sleep that whole time?" Q shook his head. "I'm sorry, T'Laren. I'd like your approval, but I don't need it anymore."

"I thought you were going to be reasonable."

"I've been reasonable! You're not being reasonable! Why should I be reasonable when you aren't?"

"Perhaps you should hear me out before assuming I'm going to be unreasonable?"

Q sighed in infuriated exasperation. "All right then! I'm listening, do you have anything reasonable to say?"

"'Unreasonable' is not a synonym for opinions you don't agree with, Q."

He stood up with such force that his chair fell over backwards. "I don't have to listen to this."

She nodded. "You don't. You don't ever have to listen to me. One wonders, however, what you're doing out here if you don't intend to listen to me."

"You never listen to me! Why should I listen to you?

"Because I am your psychologist, not vice versa. And I think even you should be able to understand why a psychologist would have a legitimate concern about your drug use."

"For the last time, _I am not addicted to_\--"

"I'm not saying you're addicted!" T'Laren interrupted, her voice raised and sharp. "Will you hear me out, or will you go in your room and sulk?"

Q sat down on the table, arms folded. "I listen raptly."

"Let's approach this from a different angle," she said. "I have conceded your point that you are not addicted. You refuse to concede mine that you are still leaning on a crutch. So let me present another side of the argument." Her eyes bored into his. "This morning, had it been an assassin entering your room and not me, you would now be dead. You may argue that you miscalculated the dosage-- I accept that. However, I believe I have evidence in your files of an incident where you very nearly died-- and where a scientist recently assigned to Starbase 56 _did_ die-- because you were sedated and didn't detect the entrance of an assassin. Perhaps you remember the incident with the Ceulan assassin?"

"It's 'see-lan', not 'soo-lan'," he said automatically, an instinctive stalling mechanism. "You Texans are barbaric." He remembered, of course. One didn't forget things like that.

"I had never heard it pronounced. And don't evade the question."

"I'm not evading it. I remember the incident."

It had been about the fifth month or so that he'd been on the starbase. They were just beginning the work against the Borg, and several top-notch scientists were being assigned to Starbase 56 for the duration of the invasion preparations. One of the scientists had been n'Vala, a Timoxi whose job it was to bridge the gap between Q's vast knowledge of physics and complete ignorance of Starfleet technology. Another had been Evan Wagner, a big, quiet xenopsychologist who was ostensibly there to learn what Q knew about the psychology of the Borg.

In fact, the person they all believed was Wagner had actually been a Ceulan-- a shapechanger with numerous unusual abilities, including the ability to detach parts of its body and continue to control them from some distance. Q had awakened groggily from drugged sleep to find Wagner leaning over him, pinning his hands back over his head, against the sides of the mattress. Before he could draw breath to scream, a third arm came out of Wagner's chest and clamped over Q's mouth. When Wagner backed away, detaching the three hands and leaving them behind to hold Q's wrists and mouth, Q had known he was faced with a Ceulan. He'd remembered far more than he wanted to about Ceulan ritual executions, and had struggled desperately, adrenaline chasing away the effects of the sedative. It had done him no good.

The shapechanger had been quite thorough. Using Q's own form and voice, it had the computer play music loudly from Q's personal library, to drown out any sounds Q could make through the gag. It had used two more hands to bind his legs, and then began a recitation of the so-called atrocities Q had committed against the Ceuli people. Ceuli had ritual executions designed for many life forms; for humanoid criminals, the ritual involved cutting through their breastbones, forcing open their ribcages, and removing their hearts. There wasn't even any way Q could plead his case or beg for mercy, let alone scream for help. He could do nothing but moan with terror as the Ceulan formed one appendage into a dense, sharp bone knife, sliced off his shirt, and began to cut through the flesh above his breastbone.

What saved him was n'Vala's lack of concern for human social mores. Timoxi tended to be sociable to the point of pushiness, and couldn't understand the human need for privacy. In theory, none of the scientists were supposed to disturb Q after his scheduled hours. N'Vala had always cheerfully ignored the prohibition, and came by whenever he felt like it, with Q perfectly free to boot him out whenever he felt like it. By throwing things at him, Q had managed to teach n'Vala what Picard had taught him a few months ago-- one did not disturb a sleeping human. But n'Vala must have assumed that Q couldn't be asleep tonight, not with the music playing so loudly, and with his usual insouciance he walked right into the suite.

This ended up being the last mistake he made. Though the shapechanger, impersonating Q, tried to keep him out of the bedroom, n'Vala, for reasons that would now always remain unknown but that Q suspected simply involved reciprocating the shapechanger's obnoxiousness, had pushed his way into the bedroom. There he saw the real Q about to be killed, and for that the shapechanger smashed in his skull. Timoxi, however, were notoriously hard-headed. N'Vala managed to live through the shapechanger's attacks long enough to get back into the hall, where the commotion of his death attracted security. Q heard them arriving, heard them shoot down the Ceulan with phasers on maximum stun.

He had thought security's arrival would mean the end of the ordeal. He hadn't realized that maximum stun only paralyzed the Ceulan, that it could still consciously direct the parts of its body holding him. The moment the stun hit, the fleshy vises that gripped Q's wrists and ankles began to tighten, snapping the bones, while the protoplasmic thing gagging him crawled down his throat and began to tear its way through his esophagus, reaching for his windpipe and crushing it from inside. The sensation was by far one of the most horrible he'd suffered. It wasn't fair. He hadn't even done anything all that bad to the Ceuli, certainly nothing deserving of this much pain and horror.

Through pain-blurred eyes, he saw Security clustered around his bed, at a loss for what to do. They couldn't shoot the thing in his throat-- maximum stun, at point-blank range against a human head, would kill the human in question. He knew that Ceuli were vulnerable to sonics, that they could save him if they only knew-- but they didn't seem to know, and he had no way of telling them. He was going to die from the ignorance of the protectors he'd chosen. The roaring in his ears drowned out their words. In despair, he had fallen to the darkness, expecting it to be death.

Later he'd awakened in sickbay-- someone had thought of the sonics after all, it seemed. But he hadn't felt safe. The fact that he had almost been killed so hideously in what should have been his private sanctum had left him terrified of sleeping. He had spent most of his nights in public places like the lounge, nursing a dozen cups of coffee until he finally fell over from exhaustion, and would usually get one or two hours of sleep in a chair with his head pillowed on a table before Security would come along and shoo him back to his room. It had been a week before he felt secure enough to take his sedatives again.

T'Laren said, "According to your files, you didn't hear the assassin enter because you were sedated. You're supposed to be a light sleeper. If you hadn't been drugged, you might well have woken up in time to call for help-- which would not only have spared you injury and a great deal of fear, but would have saved Dr. n'Vala's life as well. You were unbelievably lucky, Q. You may not be so fortunate another time."

Q shook his head, trying to think of an argument to use against that. In fact, for a little while after the attack he himself had feared sedatives. He had had to convince himself into taking them again, because sleep was a biological requirement of his existence and he couldn't sleep without them, especially not after that attack. "I doubt I'd have woken up in time anyway. It's not as if the Ceulan forced the door-- it probably came in through the vents. For all I know it could have been in my room already, impersonating a piece of furniture or something, lying in wait for me. The important consideration was that I was asleep, not that I was sedated."

"That's debatable. And whether or not it is true, it is all too easy to imagine a situation in which an assassin's intrusion _would_ wake you, were you not sedated. My point stands regardless."

"So does mine!!What alternative can you give me? I don't like having to drug myself into insensibility to get to sleep, no, but what choice do I have?" He got off the table and stood up. "Since we started this trip I've slept miserably. I've woken up three or four times a night-- you know about some of that, because you keep calling to confirm if I'm all right. I feel tired all the time. Last night was the first time in over a week that I got a decent night's sleep, and you want me to give that up without offering me anything in exchange?"

"I'm offering increased safety, for one thing. And there are ways we can deal with the problem of the nightmares. Had you considered using the meditative techniques you've learned to help you, for instance?"

"I could use them for that?"

T'Laren nodded. "The problem isn't simply that you're under stress. You haven't yet developed proper adaptations for dealing with stress. It's very easy to take comfort in drugs, just as it's very easy to remain in a deep depressive state and make no effort to pull yourself out. Both are counterproductive. If we work on it together, we can help you to overcome the problem at the source, without simply putting bandages on the symptoms."

The idea of being free of the nightmares, without the thick grogginess of the sedatives, was powerfully seductive. She was doing it to him again, he realized-- carrot and stick training again, even when he had as powerful a buttress as his computer control. But then, yielding to carrot and stick training got him lots of carrots. "Is there some technique for doing it? So that I don't have to dream, or don't remember my dreams, or can control them, or something?"

"It's not as clear-cut as that," she said. "I can't teach you a five-minute breathing exercise that can keep you from dreaming. But for one thing, your dreams will become easier to deal with as your health improves-- poor physical condition can reflect itself in your mind. Exercise can help-- not only is exercise relaxing, but it will make you sleep more deeply. Meditation can do the same thing-- you can use meditation as a tool for self-hypnosis. You may find that using self-hypnotic techniques before you go to sleep, and telling yourself that you will not have nightmares, or that you will retain some conscious control over your dreams, may do most of the work for you. At the same time, we can approach the problem from the opposite direction. You're aware of the various theories regarding the purpose of dreams?"

"Which ones?"

"Dreams tend to provide insights into one's mental state. We might try examining your dreams and trying to analyze what they mean to you."

"Didn't dream interpretation go out with Freud?"

T'Laren shook her head. "Freud's interpretation of dreams went out with Freud. No one believes anymore that dreams are primarily concerned with sex, for instance--"

"That's a relief."

She ignored the interruption. "But the basic idea that dreams bear some relationship to the personality and current mental state of the dreamer... that's held up for several hundred years. Let me ask you something. What sort of dreams do you have? What form do they take? You've told me you have constant nightmares, but what kind of nightmares are they?"

Q sighed theatrically. "Name a nightmare, any nightmare. I'm sure I've had it."

"The kind where you're at an important meeting and you suddenly realize you have no clothes on?"

"Okay, maybe there's one I haven't had." He straightened up the chair he'd knocked over before and sat in it. "There's the kind I mentioned a week ago where I have my powers back. That's not a nightmare, strictly speaking, but it's in the same ballpark. Then there's the kind where I lose my powers."

"You relive the incident?"

"No, it happens differently every time. I think I have my powers and then I don't, or someone takes them away, or something. Or sometimes I have my powers, but they don't work. One time it turned out that I was a simulacrum created by the real me to find out how he'd behave if he lost his powers. He was _very_ disappointed... There's something peculiarly horrifying about being afraid of oneself. Actually, that's a theme that turns up every so often, that the me in the dream-- the me that I am, my point of view-- is human, and I meet a me that's still a Q, and he tries to kill me. Or he does kill me. Or something else reasonably horrible happens. Sometimes I have that kind of dream from the other point of view as well, but that kind falls in the category of dreams where I have my powers back, not dreams where I lose them."

T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "That's very interesting. Why does the omnipotent side of you try to kill the mortal you?"

Q shrugged. "Different reasons. He's disappointed in me, or disgusted with me, or angry with me for destroying his life..." It occurred to him that he had just handed T'Laren wonderful ammunition for her theory that he hated himself. "In the ones where I'm the omnipotent one, I'm embarrassed by the human me. Here's this lowly, disgusting creature with bowel movements and bodily secretions, who thinks he's _me_. I mean, consider the arrogance of that."

"I think that's worthy of a great deal of further discussion, but let's not get sidetracked. Are there any other kinds?"

"Tons." He put a hand to his head and leaned on it, elbow against the table. "Let's see, there's the kind where something or other is chasing me. I have been chased all over the universe-- most often through Starbase 56, but Starbase 56 generally ends up turning into a planet, or an asteroid belt, or an nth-dimensional plane, or something. Frequently I end up in places where human beings can't survive, but that doesn't seem to matter in the dream. Then there's the kind that rewrite history. For instance-- I get versions of this one a lot-- dreams where I end up getting handed over to the Borg, and they're going to assimilate me... That one's very bad. Or dreams where the _Enterprise_ didn't beam me back when I tried to throw myself to the Calamarain, or where various assassins who didn't actually get me do, or where security tries to lynch me like I thought they would do a year ago... You get the idea."

"I think I do, yes. Do you have any pleasant dreams?"

"The ones where I have my powers back are pleasant enough, while they last," he said with a bitter half-smile. "There are several kinds of dreams like that-- that are pleasant when I'm in them, but upsetting or disturbing after I wake up." For instance, the entire category of erotic dreams, though Q would have rather had all his teeth yanked from his head than mention them.

"Any genuinely pleasant ones? Or even nondescript dreams?"

He shrugged. "Occasionally I have dreams that aren't nightmares-- not particularly pleasant, but not really unpleasant either. But not very often-- and I don't remember that kind as well as the others."

"Hm. I think perhaps it would help you if, from now on, when you have particularly bad dreams, you tell me about them. We can go over them and try to help you deal with whatever fears they may represent. Obviously, this isn't mandatory. Anything you feel should remain private, keep private. But it might help as a catharsis to talk about some of the dreams after you have them."

Q wasn't very comfortable with the notion of giving someone that much insight into his mental processes. On the other hand, he had already determined that his only chance of survival was to trust T'Laren, and another part of him enjoyed telling her about himself. There did seem to be some kind of cathartic value in sharing his fears with her. And if it helped to overcome the nightmares, he would put up with the invasion of privacy, as long as he could control the degree of the invasion. "I... all right, if you really think that might help."

"And I think that you should relinquish control of your computer access."

"Excuse me?"

T'Laren steepled her hands on the table. "As matters stand now, you can override me any time you desire."

"I gave you back your access."

"You did. And I'm grateful. But you can take that access away any time I do something you don't like. Q, we've established fairly well that I get very poor results when I try to coerce you into something. It would be illogical for me to use that technique unless you force me to it. But if it does become necessary to force you to do something, because you are being shortsighted or unreasonable again, I need to have the power to do that. In a doctor-patient relationship, it must be the doctor who has the power. If you've studied hierarchies among mortals for as long as you say, you should know that."

"I told you, I'm being reasonable. As long as _you_ treat me with some respect and don't act like you think you're my mother, I'm not going to be unreasonable."

"You can't guarantee that."

"Why not?" This was an upsetting development. "You don't trust me?"

"It's not a question of trust. I trust you to do what you are capable of... but I don't think you are invariably capable of being rational. You may suffer a spasm of depression or paranoia, you may feel unwell and take it into your head to be ornery about it... there are any number of potential reasons you might behave irrationally. You cannot entirely trust yourself, Q; how can you ask me to?"

"But I wouldn't _do_ anything. I just want to be able to keep you from forcing me to do things."

"In the end, the only weapon I can hold over your head is the fact that you need me," she said. "And that applies as much if you have control of the computers as if you don't."

"Well, what do you want me to do? I'm better with computers than you are-- you can't take that away, it isn't possible. How am I supposed to relinquish my access?"

She hesitated. "I'm sure this must be possible-- couldn't you write some sort of security program and have it authorized to my voiceprint?"

Q stared at her for a second, then laughed. "You want _me_ to create an override program for _you_."

T'Laren tilted her head slightly in a Vulcan shrug. "I have access to no other computer experts."

"Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds? You really expect me to write a program that locks me out of the computers?"

"I would like you to, yes."

"And you would trust me to do this?"

"Q, I cannot do my job if you can threaten me. You perceive your ability to lock me out of the computers as defensive; to me, however, it's a threat, and it's impossible for me to guide someone who can do that. I'm not asking you to cut yourself off from the computers entirely; I just need the ability to override any of your commands if necessary. And I would not abuse such power or use it arbitrarily. I think you know me that well by now. So yes-- keeping all that in mind, I believe that if you agree to do this for me at all that I can trust you to do it properly. I believe you can understand the need for this."

"T'Laren, I told you. I want to be an equal partner in this. I don't want to go around dominating you-- I just want to be equal."

"You can't afford to be," she said gently. "Not yet. You're not well enough."

He wanted, very badly, to reject her request out of hand, to dismiss her fears as paranoid or as a misunderstanding of him. He _wouldn't_ abuse his power. He'd promised. But... she was right, and he knew it. Doctor-patient relationships couldn't work if the two were on an equal footing, especially not psychiatric relationships. He knew that objectively, from his studies of thousands of species... he'd just been hoping it didn't apply to him.

He sighed. "All right then. Get me something to eat and I'll write you a program."

* * *

It took about an hour to write a security override for T'Laren. He sat at a terminal, using keyboard input rather than programming through voice commands because the deep code levels couldn't handle voice input well, munching on various snacks that T'Laren brought him. She spent the rest of her time looking over his shoulder, as if staring at the screen would enlighten her any better as to what he was doing. Q finally turned in exasperation. "Could you please not do that? I can't work with you watching me like that."

"Of course. Forgive me."

He was getting more and more depressed. Voluntarily giving up his own power to someone else was not in his nature, and it was upsetting him deeply that T'Laren had managed to talk him into this. To hell with logic-- logic was T'Laren's field, not his. He should never have started this, should never have offered-- but if he turned around intending to quit, there was T'Laren, expectantly waiting for him to finish. Trusting him.

On the other hand, he had never asked T'Laren to trust him-- not on this subject, at least. _Caveat emptor, my Vulcan friend_. As he worked, he wrote himself in a back door, so that in a genuine emergency he could always override T'Laren's override and get back into the system. He then finished setting up the program, cycled it and spun around in his chair. "It's all yours. Put in a password and tell it to run."

"Thank you." T'Laren bent over the keyboard as Q moved aside, ostentatiously not looking at her.

"Password accepted," the computer said. "Activating security screen."

That was it. Q felt a curious sense of deflation. He could now no longer create a program that affected system operations without T'Laren's authorization, not unless he used his back door and if he ever did that, its usefulness as a trump card was gone. Eventually, he thought, perhaps a few months from now, he'd tell T'Laren he had it and that he'd never used it, a graphic demonstration that he was more trustworthy than she'd thought. And then maybe she'd let him have equal authorization access anyway, after he'd proven he could refrain from abusing power. Maybe that would win brownie points with Lhoviri too-- part of the reason they'd thrown him out was the abuse of power.

T'Laren turned to him and smiled, a genuine brilliant smile. "Thank you, Q," she said, with feeling. "I know how difficult that was for you."

More difficult than she knew, apparently, since in the end he hadn't gone through with it. The smile made him feel vaguely guilty-- he had left himself a back door, after all. He hadn't actually done what she wanted. But he steeled himself against the guilt, reminding himself that T'Laren had been foolish to trust him so far, that he'd warned her, and that her decision to show him a smile had to be manipulation. T'Laren might have emotions, but she was as adept at hiding them as any Vulcan. If she smiled, it was because she consciously decided to. That made him feel a bit better.

"What, writing the program? That wasn't difficult," he said, pretending to misunderstand. "I'm no computer genius, T'Laren, but that was child's play."

She shook her head slightly. "The program itself was easy, I'm sure. Agreeing to create it was difficult for you, though-- especially since it would have been so easy for you to subvert the purpose somehow, to create a program that doesn't work or that you can override. I'm very glad that you resisted the temptation."

Which went to show how well she could read _him_, since he hadn't-- and then he realized that it _did_ show how well she could read him. She knew. She had to know.

The realization must have shown on his face, but she said nothing about it. "Do you feel up to our daily workout?"

If she wasn't going to mention it, he was going to diligently pretend that nothing was wrong. "When do I ever feel up to a workout?"

"Do you feel less up to it than usual, then?"

"I suppose not," he grumbled. He stood up. "Perhaps some exercise will either wake me up or give me a legitimate excuse to take a nap."

* * *

By now, they had progressed from stretching exercises to simple-- very, very simple-- self-defense techniques. Q wasn't really in the mood for self-defense; since writing T'Laren's program, he had been gripped by a vague melancholy. Maybe it was just exhaustion. After the fifth clumsy mistake, T'Laren relented and took him to the pool room, where she let him soak in the hot portion as she swam laps. He lay back in the warmth, all but his head hidden under the opaquely bubbling water, and watched her. T'Laren wore a green bathing costume that streamlined her upper body, making hips and torso blend into one smooth line, while leaving strong slim arms and legs free to cut through the water with power and grace. She was really surprisingly aesthetic as she swam. Q had always thought the notion of humanoids swimming was about as silly as cetaceans walking about on land, but he had to admit she could make it look good.

Finally, T'Laren came out of the swimming section, shivering violently, and dumped herself into the bath, across from him. "You really should do some swimming," she said. "It would be good for you."

"She says, as she clenches her teeth to keep them from chattering. Have you considered increasing the pool temperature?"

"It's not that cold."

"Then why are your lips such an unlovely shade of-- whatever they are. Bluish-green or something. They're not normal, in any case. And you have goosebumps and you're shivering."

"Vulcans aren't well-adapted to cold, especially not cold water. The water is actually warm by human standards. And I don't keep it warmer because I don't want to lose my edge; I used to swim in water much colder than that back home." She sprawled out, ducking her hair back into the warm water.

"I don't care about your edge. I care about my near-complete lack of normal human insulation. I'm not going swimming in water that can make you shiver."

"We can warm it up for you if you like." T'Laren ducked her whole body under the water level for several seconds, turning into an indistinct tan and green blur. She came up, shook her head violently, and sighed. "I think it's more pleasant to go from a somewhat chilly swim into a warm bath, myself."

"Where did you find cold water to swim in in Texas?"

"I didn't. We used to go to a beach house in Oregon, every summer... I had no trouble with Texan heat, obviously, and my father had grown up there, but my mother was Scandinavian and preferred a cooler temperature." She leaned back and gazed up at the ceiling, her eyes slightly unfocused as she remembered. "The first time I went, I was seven, and I'd never seen an ocean before. I'd spent most of my life in space, the rest of it inland-- the most water I'd ever seen in one place was a smallish lake, and here was water that went on forever. I had a sort of horrified fascination with tides and the concept of the undertow-- Earth's ocean seemed to me some kind of hungry thing, that wanted to suck me in and drown me. And I've never had any patience with being afraid-- I learned to swim so I could show the ocean that I wasn't afraid of it, that I could go into its mouth and come back out safely."

Q looked at T'Laren askance. "Mortal children have very strange notions."

T'Laren glanced at him. "I suppose you were born omniscient."

"No... but I was born with considerably more sense than that."

"You never had a silly notion? A childish fear? A method of perceiving the universe that you later realized to be wrong?"

Q shook his head. "I did, but it wouldn't make any sense to describe it to you. My 'childhood' wasn't analogous to anything you would understand."

She nodded, and leaned back again. "After I'd been there a while, I felt... The ocean was a symbol of Earth, a banner of my alienness. Did you know, I can drink seawater? My mother was horrified to find me sitting by the beach one day, sipping seawater from cupped hands-- she'd studied medical texts on Vulcans and the care of Vulcan children, but nothing had ever bothered to mention that Vulcans can drink saline solution in Terran ocean concentrations. And when she told me that humans couldn't do that, that it would make them thirstier and eventually kill them, I felt it as a badge of my alien nature, a sign that I didn't belong. Oceans are alien to my kind-- I belonged on a hot, dry desert. I didn't belong here." She shook her head slightly. "And when I first set foot on Vulcan... I found it unbearably hot and dry, and the gravity dragged at me and made me exhausted. Biology, it seems, is not destiny."

"If the ocean made you feel alien, why do you enjoy swimming so much?"

"Perversity. It's in my nature, that if I do not belong somewhere I force my way in. I make the alien accept me, I make it my home. I did the same thing when I went undercover in the Romulan Empire-- I have been more human than humans, more Vulcan than Vulcans, more Romulan than the Romulans."

"I didn't know you went undercover in the Romulan Empire."

"You didn't study a detail of my file-- what you called up were the highlights. But yes, I was a Romulan for a year. It was... a fascinating experience. Not one I would ever want to repeat, but very revealing."

Abruptly she climbed out of the hot tub. "Get out of there, you're starting to look far too flushed. I don't want you getting heat stroke."

"No chance of that," Q said. He stretched his limbs out under the water. "Computer, reset hot tub temperature for 34° C." He looked up at T'Laren. "There. It's four degrees below my body temperature. You have to be happy with that."

"That's acceptable," she said. She pulled one of the foam pool chaises over to the side of the tub and lay down on it.

"Going undercover sounds like a far more interesting career than being a counselor. If you were more Romulan than the Romulans, why did you quit?"

"I didn't quit. My mission was over, so I came home. Besides... I'm far too social a being to bear undercover work very well. I missed my friends, and the Federation, and the freedom to be myself. I was a very lonely Romulan." She lay back again, closing her eyes. "I only did it in the first place because the number of Vulcans who can effectively impersonate Romulans is very few. Most Federation spies in the Romulan Empire are human, or Betazoid, or some other near-human race, despite the fact that such spies can be given away by a paper cut, because they can act and most Vulcans can't. I was offered a career in Intelligence if I wanted it. But the same factors that gave me the ability to impersonate a Romulan made me far more miserable doing so than a typical Vulcan would have been."

Q frowned, studying her for a few seconds. "If you're such a social being and whatnot... how can you stand being locked up on a space yacht with only me for company?"

T'Laren's eyes snapped open and she sat up quickly, swinging her legs off the chaise and onto the floor so she could face him. "Q, I didn't say I was dissatisfied with our current arrangement."

"No, you didn't. But you said you're a social being and you missed your friends. Don't you still miss them? I'm..." He considered how best to phrase this-- he didn't want to sound whiny or self-pitying. "I'm undoubtedly not the most charming of companions. Don't you-- doesn't that create problems for you?"

"It doesn't, and it wouldn't matter it did," she said. "I have a job to do, and that's the most important consideration. But it was very considerate of you to ask. Thank you."

He was not very accustomed to praise-- it seemed as if he'd spent most of the last three years being criticized and condemned, and so he had few defenses against kind words. A warm flush of slightly embarrassed pleasure spread through him. He hadn't even been trying to make her think he was being considerate-- it was simply a question that had seemed important for him to ask. Q smiled almost without volition. "Was it really?"

"Yes. It was."

Q gazed out at the pool, still smiling. "Hmm. Maybe I'm not completely hopeless after all." He glanced over to T'Laren to gauge her reaction. "Don't you think?"

"I never thought you were completely hopeless."

"Would you have taken the case if you thought I was?"

"I had to take the case," she said. "I owed Lhoviri. But I suspect he wouldn't have asked me if you were completely hopeless." She got up and padded over to the swimming pool. "Are you sure you don't want a swim?"

"Positive."

"What if I warm up the pool?"

"Maybe later," he said to get her off his back. T'Laren seemed to think that every minute he didn't spend exercising or eating was a waste.

He had to admit some appreciation for her methods, now. He had gained back most of the weight that the suicide attempt had lost him, so that he now merely looked thin again and no longer like a study aid for medical students. Q had a sneaking suspicion that T'Laren had been dosing him with an appetite enhancer, as he was hungrier lately, and taking more pleasure in food, than he'd been in nearly a year. He hadn't yet mentioned it, because he didn't want to look stupid if he was wrong-- and besides, he really didn't mind all that much. He had been able to tolerate his own horrible appearance only because of some perverse notion that his looks should reflect his mental state-- in some ways, it would have been unbearable to look good when he was so miserable inside. Now that he was starting to feel a bit better, it seemed entirely appropriate that he should start looking better too.

T'Laren returned, cold once again, and climbed into the pool with him. "I really think you ought to do some swimming," she said. "We cut your training session short so you wouldn't get hurt, but you still need your daily exercise."

If this went on, he was going to end up being forced to swim, and he still despised swimming. "I have a question I've been meaning to ask you, actually," he said, conjuring up an offering to appease her.

"Go ahead."

"I was thinking about what we discussed before, about dreams. And I was thinking about a particular dream I had a few weeks ago that's been bothering me for some time." If anything could get T'Laren off the topic of exercise, he figured, a dream would do it. And while he was pretty sure he could guess what this one had meant, he _was_ actually interested in seeing what T'Laren made of it.

T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "If I didn't know better, I would guess that you were trying to avoid swimming."

"Would I do a thing like that?"

"Most certainly you would."

Q grinned and leaned back. "Maybe just a little," he said. "But it really has been bothering me. I thought of it before when we were discussing dreams, but I got sidetracked."

"Very well," T'Laren said with the good-natured resignation of someone defeated at her own game. "Tell me about it."

"I don't know if you remember-- or if you ever knew. This happened the night before I met you, the first night I was conscious after I tried to kill myself. And you remember, I'm sure, how Li went out of his way to torment me by refusing me access to the computers, or the ability to talk, or anything at all to occupy my time."

"I remember that," she said, nodding. "Though I think phrasing it as 'Li went out of his way to torment you' is perhaps a slight exaggeration."

"Oh, no. I exaggerate not at all," Q said. He sat up and leaned forward slightly. "Shortly after Li refused me computer access, I tried to ask a nurse for it back. In response, she put my hand in a restraint so I couldn't reach the call button, and left me that way. She claimed she was going to come back in an hour and let my hand free again, but I'm positive several must have passed before it occurred to anyone that I might have a genuine emergency and it would be nice if I could call for help, wouldn't it? Now if that isn't maliciously tormenting a sick man, I'd like to know what is."

"Putting itching powder in a sick man's bed would qualify as malicious torment a bit better, I think," T'Laren said. "As would refusing him medical care, adjusting the temperature of his bedroom to be uncomfortable, dumping cold water on him--"

"I get the idea. You're a laugh riot, T'Laren. Remind me not to get sick around you. My point is that I was miserably bored. I was trying not to go to sleep, because I was afraid I'd have nightmares... but I was also exhausted, and ill, and bored out of my mind, so one can imagine how successful I was. And I had a very vivid nightmare... actually, I'm not sure whether to classify it as a nightmare or not. It was definitely nightmarish in plot, but the emotional content it evoked was completely inappropriate. In any case, it was very vivid-- I might even have thought it actually happened, except that if it had, I wouldn't be here."

"Go on."

"I dreamed that I woke up-- you know how you can have those dreams where everything starts out being exactly as it is in reality? I was in sickbay, my hand was still in the restraint, and it was dim in the room, so I couldn't see very clearly. And there was a person standing next to my bed. It was a large humanoid, probably male, although it could have been a big woman like Anderson-- I couldn't really tell, he was in shadow. Since I couldn't talk, I couldn't ask him to come closer where I could see him properly. I had just started to wonder if he was there to turn on my speaker or something when he put a pillow over my head.

"At first I was terrified. I tried to struggle, but I was in the same physical position in the dream as I was in real life, and you remember what that was. I had one hand free, but I was too weak to lift it as far as my head, and reaching the call button with it was out of the question. Then I remembered that I wanted to die, that this person was giving me something I'd tried and failed to obtain for myself, and I relaxed.

"After that it was very... pleasant." Q frowned, remembering. "I felt an overwhelming sense of happiness, that I was finally getting to die. I even felt gratitude. I would have thanked my murderer if I could talk. It seemed as if he had come as a benefactor, that he had come to put me out of my misery as a mercy. I realized at one point that I wasn't breathing anymore, but it didn't feel at all unpleasant-- I've suffocated in reality before, and it's quite horrible. This was nothing like that. I felt no urge to breathe at all. I was overwhelmed with a sort of euphoric dizziness-- it felt as if I were spinning out of my body, like a butterfly trapped in a cocoon, squirming its way free. Or as if I were being tugged out of a whirlpool that had been dragging me down, or flying free of a planetary gravity well. And I felt an enormous sense of gratitude that I was being allowed such a pleasant death. My own attempt had been truly horrific. This was... wonderful."

He shook his head, trying to dispel the vague and disturbing yearning he felt toward the memory. "Then I woke up, which startled me quite a bit. I'd been utterly convinced it was actually happening. My head hurt terribly, my hand was still in the restraint, and I was still terribly bored. And I felt an awful sense of disappointment that it had been a dream. I peered into the darkness for some time-- you have to understand, I was barely awake, and I wasn't thinking very straight-- hoping it would turn out to be true after all, that there was a mercy killer lurking in the shadows. Which, of course, there wasn't."

Q looked up at T'Laren, intending to gauge her reaction. It was far more than he had expected. She seemed to have gone very still, retreating into one of her Vulcan silences. "T'Laren?"

"Did you by any chance tell security about this?" she asked.

"About a dream? Don't be ridiculous." He stared at her. "T'Laren, what's wrong?"

"That... was not a dream, Q."

Not a dream? He blinked. "How could it have actually happened? T'Laren, I _died_ in it. Unless our current adventures are a dream themselves, and these are really the last few nanoseconds of my existence, it had to have been a dream."

"You didn't die. You lost consciousness. For that matter, even if you had had a clear near-death experience, life support might have brought you back."

"How do you _know_ it was a dream? Were you the killer?"

She ignored that. "Do you have any reason, aside from your difficulty in explaining your survival, to believe that it was a dream?"

"It happened when I was asleep."

"It happened when you were half-asleep. And predisposed to believe that anything happening to you might have been a dream."

"All right then, if it wasn't a dream why aren't I dead?"

T'Laren folded her hands in front of her. She looked as if she were cold, despite the warmth of the bath. "You were on respiratory life-support. Your trachea and lungs were too badly damaged to risk letting them handle the entire burden of your respiration; most of your oxygen was being supplied directly into your bloodstream. Cutting off the supply to your lungs would only produce mild anoxia; and such anoxia can produce a euphoric high, much like what you describe."

"Oh." Q considered that. "That would mean... hmm. I wonder who it was."

"You seem remarkably unconcerned."

"I'm not on Starbase 56 any more; whoever he was, I'll probably never see him again. Probably some security guard who saw me helpless and couldn't resist the temptation any longer. The trail would be quite cold by now."

"I think we should call Starbase 56. Perhaps they have security camera images still on file."

"If you want to. I really don't care all that much. Whoever he was, whatever his motives, I was quite happy with his actions at the time."

"You were also quite happy with Thelkas's actions."

"You have a point." Q shrugged. "Okay, go ahead. Call Starbase 56 if you want." He leaned back. "Euphoric high from anoxia, hmm? If I ever get around to trying it again, I'll have to remember that one."

"Don't say that." Under the veneer of Vulcan control, T'Laren seemed truly agitated.

"T'Laren." Q moved forward, walking on his knees the short distance across the bathtub. He put his hands on her shoulders. "What are you getting so upset about? It was a joke. As for the other thing... it didn't happen, all right? What, were you afraid I'd die before you could pay off your debt to Lhoviri?"

"Jokes are commonly defined as statements which are funny," she said, but there was a hollowness in the retort. "And I am very concerned for you. You are enough at risk for suicide without deciding you have a taste for self-strangulation."

"It was a _joke_, T'Laren. Perhaps not a funny one, but a joke nonetheless. Do you seriously think I would find some entertainment value in strangling myself?"

"Yes."

"_Why?_ Who would be sick enough to _enjoy_ something like that?"

"Many human beings would. Have you never heard of autoerotic fatalities?"

Q released T'Laren and backed away, sitting back down in the water. "Do I really want to hear this?"

"Mild anoxia is pleasurable for many humans. Throughout history, many so-called suicides have been accidents, as people who discovered the pleasures of being breathless miscalculated, and lost their breath for all time. I thought you were an expert on the dark side of humanity, Q."

"I must have missed that one." Q stared at T'Laren. "That is utterly disgusting. Do you think for a second I would kill myself-- or even risk my life-- for _sexual_ reasons? Oh, that is _repulsive_. I'm ashamed of you."

"Ashamed of me? You are the one who found pleasure in being suffocated."

"It wasn't erotic pleasure, I _assure_ you."

"Would you know erotic pleasure from any other kind?"

That was definitely not a question Q wanted to answer. A truthful answer would be hideously embarrassing and a false one would lose him the argument. "It was a sensation of peace, T'Laren. The euphoria of freedom. It wasn't the first time, either. I felt similarly the second time I tried to kill myself, and that had nothing to do with strangulation at all. Or are you going to tell me that another human sexual perversion involves slitting one's own wrists for thrills?"

"No. Not to my knowledge." She climbed out of the bath and knelt by the side. "I find this very disturbing, Q. Will you tell me about this? I have never heard of people finding pleasure in cutting their wrists. Perhaps it will make sense in context."

"The context might take quite some time to explain."

"Then I think you should get out of the bathtub. Shall we go to the kitchen to discuss this?"

That struck him as a very good idea. As soon as T'Laren had mentioned sex, he had started to feel very uncomfortable being around her with both of them in a near-nude state. If he was going to tell her about the circumstances of his second suicide attempt, he wanted to be wearing his armor again.

In the end, they ended up on Deck 2, the observation lounge-- the kitchen was too small to pace in, and Q couldn't sit down. A nervous energy coursed through him, forcing him to pace circles around the table where T'Laren sat. She had gotten herself better composed now, sitting in expectant quietude. It occurred to Q that what he had seen a few minutes ago had to have been a genuine lapse in control-- normally he could tell when T'Laren was feeling emotion because her surface became totally emotionless. He had never before seen her badly shaken enough that she actually showed a bit of it. What had frightened her so badly? Surely it wasn't _that_ strange that a man who'd recently attempted suicide might find relief in his own murder. He didn't feel that way anymore-- was she afraid he was going to go back to his room and strangle himself or something?

"I asked you once why you tried to kill yourself the first two times, and you tossed the question back at me. You and I have discussed a bit of the reason for your first attempt-- that it was very much a spur of the moment thing, that it was born from a sudden surge of despair late at night-- I feel I understand your motives, at least a bit. But I've always meant to ask you about the second attempt again, because it doesn't seem to fit. It seems very much like a gesture, and yet I don't think you intended it as such." She stopped following him with her eyes. "Q, please stop pacing in circles. It makes it difficult to talk to you."

He stopped, standing in T'Laren's line of sight. "So you're asking me why I did it."

"Do you actually know?"

"Of course I know, I've always known. I tried to kill myself because I was afraid of being killed."

"On the surface of it that makes little sense. Can you explain?"

"I intend to." He resumed pacing, this time keeping inside T'Laren's line of sight. "Undoubtedly in the course of all your interviews you've heard many versions of this story. It all began with the death of Lieutenant Commander Masaru Ohmura. You've heard about this, no doubt?"

"Other people's versions of the story, yes."

"Ah, but other people aren't me. And I really do believe I know a good bit more about what happened than anyone else does. So let me begin from the top, all right? With me? Good."

Q faced her. "You've undoubtedly heard that Ohmura was a good man, the salt of the earth, a marvelous checkers player and a wonderful security chief, all that nonsense. And I'm not going to contradict any of it. Ohmura was actually rather good to me, all things considered, and saved me from some truly crushing humiliations in my early months on the base. But he made a fatal mistake in letting the antiques dealer aboard-- a mistake he couldn't have known he was making, a mistake that wasn't his fault, but a mistake nonetheless. It killed him, and very nearly killed me."

He started to pace again. "The man's name was Tom Lindon, and he claimed to be an antiques dealer. Since at the time I was staving off the crushing boredom of my existence by the pointless acquisition of material goods, and since Starbase 56 had a fairly large budget devoted to keeping me, if not happy, at least functional, his motive for coming here was utterly transparent-- the lure of money. It was so obvious, any other motive might have seemed unthinkable. And in fact, for Ohmura and anyone else who listened to Lindon's little statement of purpose, any other motive _was_ unthinkable. Ohmura let Lindon aboard with a cargo of twentieth-century guns, one of which was loaded."

"Anderson said it was loaded later."

"Anderson wasn't there. I was. Ohmura started to examine each weapon; then Lindon said something like, 'They're all unloaded-- surely everyone can see that', and that, it seems, was enough for our doughty security chief. Now, Ohmura was a good security chief. He made mistakes-- thinking the Ceulan shapechanger was Dr. Wagner, for one, but who knew how to calibrate the sensors to detect a shapechanger? And a mistake like simply taking someone's word for it that weapons were unloaded was not in his repertoire. But I was there, and that was what he did." Q picked up a salt shaker to fidget with, peering intently at it. He glanced back at T'Laren. "And do you know what? It didn't strike me as strange at all at the time. It seemed quite self-evident that the weapons were, in fact, unloaded. And I don't make mistakes like that, either. Not after two years of paranoia and several million of watching the evil that men do."

"Are you implying some outside force was involved?"

"I'll get to it. Patience, my dear doctor, is a virtue. Didn't they teach you that in Texas?" He put down the salt shaker and sat down on the table, putting a napkin ring around his finger and twirling it around. "In any case. Some time later, Commander Ohmura, Commodore Anderson, a whole gaggle of spear-carriers, and I were all in one of the conference lounges, examining Lindon's wares. Lindon had gone across the room to get a new toy for me, or so he claimed. He then pulled out a pistol and announced-- and I remember his exact words quite clearly-- 'Q, I'm going to kill you.'"

Q slid off the table and put the napkin rings down. It was an effort to remain nonchalant, an effort to keep calm, remembering the horrible injustice that had been done him. "Undoubtedly you've heard the next part. I froze up, in either an unparalleled act of cowardice or a malicious attempt to get Ohmura killed, depending on who you talk to. And on cue, Ohmura died to save me, an act generally considered to be phenomenally wasteful on his part and a cruel joke played by the Universe on the denizens of Starbase 56. Right?"

"The story I heard was a bit less biased than that, but the facts were fairly similar," T'Laren said.

"Well, here's an interesting fact for you. I don't freeze when I'm frightened. I don't necessarily do something constructive, mind you. I shriek, or run away, or curl up on the ground with my arms over my head and grovel. But I have never, in my entire mortal existence, frozen out of fear. Never. Which, being the remarkable psychologist and armchair sleuth that you are, should lead you to the conclusion that I froze for some other reason. And we'll get to that. But there's another point I want to make.

"Consider. An antiques dealer, a trader, who'd never done anything more morally strenuous than undercut a competitor or purchase possibly stolen goods, throws his career and his freedom away and gets sent to a rehab colony because he decided to kill a complete stranger on another complete stranger's say-so. Now let us factor in that his client was a woman of the Physm, a species of surpassing ugliness by human standards. Even given that humans are famous for screwing anything, it would take a human perverse to the point of mental illness to find a Physm attractive-- they have faces like weeping sores. Let us further consider that this woman, who has just engineered the death of a popular officer, needs only to tell a sob story to the denizens of Starbase 56, and everyone is firmly convinced that all the blame belongs on _me_, for victimizing her twenty years ago. And never mind the fact that the Federation determined that I couldn't be held responsible now for what I did as a Q, and never mind the fact that all of them were well aware that I did not exactly spread peace and love throughout the universe. I mean, what _did_ they think all those beings wanted to kill me for? Did they think I owed them money? What?"

"It was explained to me that no one had been directly confronted with the knowledge of your crimes, except those you committed against humanity."

"Whoever told you that is a liar, or else has a memory like a sieve. The Mirou announced what they wanted me for, quite clearly. A few others accused me in front of witnesses. Admittedly, the crime Melex accused me of was considerably worse by standards of human morality than what I did to the Mirou or any of the others that accused me. So let's give our Starfleet friends the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they really were shocked and horrified at my actions. And we can factor out the ugliness because Starfleet members are so tolerant and xenophilic and wonderful. But why would a man with no particular history of violence throw his future away to kill a man he didn't even know on the request of a hideous alien whom he had no reason to trust?"

"I'm not sure I see your point."

"I haven't made my point yet. There's one vital fact you need to know to make sense of this picture, a fact I myself had forgotten until a week or so after the attack. And that is: the Physm use psionic devices. You may know something of these kinds of things, since the ancient Vulcans also developed psionic devices-- amplifiers that could enable non-psis to do what psis can do." He put a hand on her table, standing over her. "Now do you see the pattern?"

"You believe some sort of... mind control was involved?"

Q nodded. "Melex probably had some sort of subtle persuader-- not mind control, per se, but something to influence people into agreeing with her. To increase their sympathy for her. Lindon, however, had obviously been given a direct mind control device, something that operated on spoken cues. When he said, 'The guns are unloaded,' it became so self-evident that they were in fact unloaded that an experienced security guard didn't think to check. And when he said that he was going to kill me... well, you see the progression."

T'Laren nodded slowly. "I do indeed."

"It was as if I'd heard it straight from God. He was going to kill me. It was utterly obvious and completely unavoidable. Have you ever experienced the sense of... convergence? That a certain event is destined, inevitable?"

"No, I don't believe so."

"I have, frequently. I think humans experience this in hindsight mostly. Because the Q can see so many more of the variables involved, we can see something inevitable ahead of time-- without actually looking into the future, which is a complicated and annoying process and I very rarely did it. We almost never see convergence with ourselves-- we don't generally have enough objectivity. This time, though, I experienced a sense of convergence as a human, regarding myself. It seemed that it was my destiny to be killed this way, that my entire mortal existence and possibly my entire existence as a Q had been leading up to it. I heard Anderson shout at me to get down, but... there didn't seem to be any point. It was inevitable, after all. And I wasn't afraid, not at all. I was about to fulfill my destiny."

His expression darkened, an inward focusing. "And then Ohmura threw himself in the way, and there was a gunshot... and I was lying on the floor with Ohmura on top of me, both of us covered with his blood. And the spell broke. I realized how close I had come to being the one whose brains were decorating the rug, and it terrified me. I couldn't understand what had happened-- why I hadn't resisted, why I had been so stupid as to simply stand there. When Anderson screamed at me that I'd disobeyed a direct order and as a result a good man was dead, I couldn't defend myself-- I remembered that I'd done it, but I could no longer comprehend why." He shook his head. "I _didn't_ want to see Ohmura dead. I owed a lot to him. And... I've seen mortals die before, hordes of them, but never in my arms, when I was mortal too, when the fatal blow had been aimed at me. I think I was in shock. My stupidity had gotten someone I respected killed, and I knew it. My memory isn't what it used to be; I didn't make the connection with the Physm's psi devices until a week or so after Melex's confession, far too late for it to do me any good."

"When was Melex captured?"

"Later that day. She was oh, so contrite. She'd been in a little ship just out of range of our sensors, waiting for Lindon to come back with the metaphorical equivalent of my head on a platter. Apparently it had never occurred to her that something could go wrong and an innocent man could die. The Physm are very intelligent, but they have no common sense whatsoever."

"Did you do what she accused you of?"

"Yes." He refused to justify his actions-- he was tired of explaining everything he'd done out of the moral context he'd done it in. "But I'm not entirely sure that would have been enough, if not for some sort of persuader device. I could see people deciding that I'd done something really rotten and they despised me for it-- but they did more than despise me. They blamed me personally for Ohmura's death, and they turned on me.

"A few days after the attack, I decided I wanted to get away from everyone, and so I went for a walk. I was doing this frequently around that time-- I knew perfectly well that everyone hated me then, and I wanted to put some distance between them and me. But I was responding to a vague, rather amorphous threat, and so I did exactly the wrong thing-- by putting distance between me and most people, I ensured that anyone who really wanted my blood could have perfect privacy to draw it in. And since my path was fairly regular-- there just weren't that many places on the base that I was authorized to go that wouldn't involve walking through population centers-- it was easy for someone to ambush me. I came around a corner and there were two men with masks on, and at that moment I knew I was almost certainly going to die."

"Why?"

"Well, the masks, for one thing. Human beings are not one of the deadliest species in the galaxy; they're moderate, average, a boring little species for the most part. They're far less passionate, or dangerous, than the Klingons, or the ancient Vulcans-- which is of course why your people had to go so hyper-rational and humans didn't, that biologically you're far more irrational than humans. But there are times when they rival the most dangerous races in their class for sheer scariness. When humans aggregate into a mob, they are among the most frightening of entities on their evolutionary level in this quadrant of the galaxy. And when they put on masks, especially civilized, highly moral humans, it's an indication that they plan to do something absolutely heinous, something they would be ashamed of if they were not hiding their faces. So when you meet two masked male humans in a dark hallway far from centers of population, and they grab you, shove you up against the wall, and rip off your combadge, you know it's time to be terrified out of your mind. You know that they've waited in ambush for you, that they're planning to do something hideously awful to you, and that they're not going to let you call for help."

"Did you try to fight back?"

"I _couldn't!_ I made a few feeble attempts to resist, yes, but these two were experienced with violence. They wouldn't give me a moment to think, to defend myself-- they just kept hitting me. I discovered some time ago that begging helps get one out of that sort of situation-- under normal circumstances, someone who's beating you just wants acknowledgment that they've defeated you, and if you beg for mercy it serves the purpose. I tried begging this time, and they told me to shut up and then kicked me in the head... I was positive I was going to die. I don't think I have ever before or since been so afraid. All the other times I've been attacked, I've known that humans were around somewhere, willing to rescue me-- even at times when I wasn't sure they knew _how_ to rescue me, as with the Ceulan, I knew they would at least try. But this time... it was my protectors themselves who were attacking me, and what kind of a chance did I have against that? It was obvious that they had planned this so that Security wouldn't interfere-- in fact, I was sure they _were_ Security, from the way they moved and the fact that they said they were doing this for Ohmura. So if Security wanted me dead, there was no chance whatsoever that someone would rescue me- my only hope was if they decided to be merciful, and after they kicked me in the head for begging them to stop there didn't seem to be much chance of that."

He shook his head. "Something else about humans, they're remarkably inefficient killers. Not when they decide to be rational, of course. When humans set their minds to cold-blooded murder, they're awfully good at it. But when they become a mob, when they sink to the level of instinctive violence, they aren't efficient about it at all. Which you would think would be a good thing, but it's not. A human trying to beat you to death will take twice as long and inflict twice as much damage on you as a Klingon would, with the result that you hurt four times as much. I've suffered injuries that were far more painful or damaging in and of themselves-- actually, when I drank the acid I inflicted such an injury on myself. But when one factors together quantity, quality and duration of pain, I'd have to say that that beating was the most agonizing experience I've ever suffered through, exacerbated considerably by the fact that I never completely lost consciousness. Mostly they left my head alone and concentrated on the rest of my body, which can generate just as much pain as being hit in the head if not more, but is less likely to kill you and also less likely to knock you out. I wouldn't say I was lucid through most of it, but I was definitely aware."

Q began to pace again. "When they left me, I couldn't quite believe it. I knew they knew I was alive--" he had still been whimpering, so they must have known-- "and I was still sure they wanted to kill me, which left the idea that they were toying with me. I could see my combadge, about a meter away from where I lay. It might as well have been a light-year. I lay there on the floor, paralyzed with indecision and terror-- if I stayed where I was, without medical attention, I'd die. But if I tried to reach my combadge, I was sure they'd step out of the shadows and kick it out of my hand as soon as I was about to grasp it, and then finish what they'd started. Or that I'd call for help, and whoever I called would be in on it-- or even not in on it, simply a part of the mob mentality-- and would kill me or hand me back over to my tormentors."

"What did you do?"

"Well, in the end, I went for the combadge. And that was a seriously unpleasant experience. It must have taken me a half hour or more to crawl that meter-- I think objectively it probably took a half hour, but it felt like a geological epoch. And when I finally managed to call sickbay, and Li showed up, I kept begging him not to kill me, and he kept telling me that he was Li, the doctor. I knew he was a doctor. But he was human, and I was frightened of all humans right then. When they put me under sedation, I tried to resist it, because I really didn't expect they'd let me wake up.

"After I did wake up, I told Anderson I was sure it was Security, and she had a fit. She refused to even entertain the possibility. That was when I knew she was part of it too, that I couldn't trust her any more than I could trust any human, which, right then, was only as far as I needed to."

"Sekal said you believed there was some sort of conspiracy against you?"

"Sekal said that?" Q frowned. "He didn't understand, then. I never thought it was a conspiracy-- if there had been an organized conspiracy to kill me aboard Starbase 56, I would be dead. No, what I thought I was dealing with was a mob. Not an organized, rational, conscious decision to kill me-- simply a general consensus separately held by each individual on the base that I was responsible for Ohmura's death and thus deserved to die. Though, come to think of it, if T'Meth thought I thought it was a conspiracy it would explain a lot."

"You asked her to protect you, I know."

"Yes. I figured that a Vulcan would be able to resist the pressure of the mob mentality-- T'Meth might not like me very much, but she would do her duty. And I was convinced that the rest of Security was going to kill me sooner or later. The two men who attacked me were still at large, at first; even after they were caught and court-martialed, it was obvious that public sympathies were on their side. Now, not only had I gotten Ohmura killed but I'd provoked two officers into ruining their careers. At first, I had T'Meth watching over me, and while I didn't feel safe, exactly, I felt considerably safer than I would without her. After the court-martial, though, T'Meth said I was being paranoid, and no one else in Security would break their Starfleet oaths that way. T'Meth couldn't see that Security had become a mob-- she wasn't their target, and they were her friends, and she was too rational to fully understand how irrational human beings can get. If she thought I thought it was a conspiracy, I can see her point-- that _would_ be being paranoid. But no, I expected a lynching party.

"I doubt you can imagine what it felt like, to spend every moment in mortal terror. I was convinced Security was going to get me-- it was just a matter of time. I stopped taking sedatives-- I was afraid to sleep, I kept thinking they would come for me at night and I wanted to be awake for it, though what I thought I could do if I was awake I don't know. I couldn't eat, I lost weight. I was sick with fear-- my head and stomach hurt constantly, I couldn't keep food down when I managed to eat it at all, and I lived in a constant haze of exhaustion, punctuated by spikes of pure terror. I tried to tell Anderson what was going on-- how they would stare at me, telling me with their entire body language that they were going to kill me soon-- but how do you explain a thing like that? She couldn't see that they were conveying murderous intent-- she probably had too much murderous intent of her own to see it. Anderson wanted me dead too, she was just too disciplined to do it herself. Medellin couldn't see it, T'Meth, Sekal, no one could see it but me, either because they didn't want to or they weren't familiar enough with murderous humans. I was afraid of everyone, but I didn't dare be alone, because they could come for me when I was alone. But crowds didn't offer any safety, either-- crowds could become lynching mobs. Except when I was working, and sometimes even then, I was constantly wondering if this was the last moment, if it was about to happen now. My work suffered-- well, you can imagine. I felt like anything I said, anything I did, could be the spark that ignited the firestorm.

"And even if they didn't kill me, even if T'Meth was right, I depended on these people for my life! They didn't actually need to touch me. All they needed to do was wait a few weeks until the next aliens with grudges showed up, come a little bit late to my rescue, and I'd be dead. 'I'm sorry, Commodore, there's been a terrible accident. Q's combadge was apparently malfunctioning-- we didn't even realize he was in trouble until the Miblians had finished eating him. But hey, he was an asshole, so no big loss, right?' With that factored into the equation, I effectively had no chance at all of surviving more than a few more weeks.

"I was waiting for security to come escort me to a meeting in a few hours, in a state of terror as usual, when I realized that fact-- when I fully understood that I had no chance of survival-- and it made me understand what my options really were. I could continue the way I was, waiting to be murdered in some hideous fashion, spending my last few days of existence in a state of constant terror. Or I could take my death into my own hands, and make sure that my passing was as pleasant as possible. After I put it to myself that way, it became obvious that my best alternative was suicide.

"Once I had made the decision, I felt an enormous sense of relief. I had to work quickly, so they wouldn't interrupt me and take my death away from me, but aside from that urgency I felt no pressure at all anymore. They used to let me have a topical anesthetic spray back then-- it wasn't poisonous and it wasn't ingestible, so they couldn't figure out how I could kill myself with it. I sprayed my wrists until they were quite numb, and ran a bath as hot as I could stand it. Then I lay back in the tub and relaxed, and when I felt I was ready I took a ceramic mug-- there wasn't any breakable glass in my room, for the same reason there were no sharp edges, but I did have ceramics-- smashed it, and cut my wrists with the edge, as deeply as I could before it started to hurt.

"Bleeding to death's not a bad way to go, as long as the injury that's killing you isn't causing you much pain-- the loss of blood itself makes you dizzy and cold, but if you're not resisting it and you have some source of warmth other than your own body heat it's actually very nice. And the relief-- it was incredible. After all that time of being terrified, to be finally free of fear... words fail me at how wonderful it was. It wasn't actually that I was glad to be dying so much as that I was overjoyed to be free of the fear that I'd be killed. In some ways, it wasn't as nice as the incident with the pillow-- I didn't feel euphoria, and I certainly didn't feel gratitude. But the release of tension was almost an ecstasy. I was so tired, and it felt so good to finally be able to yield to it." He smiled ironically. "I suppose you could say I'd have died to get a good night's sleep."

"But you didn't die."

"No. I found out later I did it all wrong. I didn't cut deeply enough or over enough area to bleed to death before they found me. Apparently you're supposed to cut along the wrist, not across it, and you're supposed to cut deeper than that. Of course, I didn't have any really sharp edges, and I was trying to avoid pain as much as possible-- after I got below the level where the anesthetic had taken effect, I couldn't keep cutting. And I didn't allow enough time-- security came for me in an hour or so, and apparently I was still alive then." An old bitterness welled up. "Li kept insisting that I'd done it to get attention, that I'd done it too poorly if I'd genuinely wanted to die. Anderson thought it was some kind of grandiose melodramatic gesture, taken straight out of fiction. I don't suppose it ever occurred to either of them that I _got_ it out of fiction, that human methods of ending their own pathetic existences had never interested me enough when I had my powers that I remembered any practical ways of doing it. I didn't have access to drugs or sharp edges or large bodies of water-- what did they expect I was going to do? Hold my breath? In fiction, people cut their wrists in bathtubs. I thought there might be some reason why it would be more pleasant to do it that way-- perhaps the hot water numbs the pain somewhat, or maybe it's the relaxing qualities, or maybe you get waterlogged and that somehow makes it easier-- _I_ didn't know. And I don't know why they expected me to know. I didn't do it to get attention-- why would I want attention from people I thought wanted me dead? I wanted to get away from them, not to get sympathy."

"Did you tell them so?"

"They wouldn't have listened," Q muttered angrily. "They'd already made up their minds. I could live with Li being stupid and wrong-headed-- at least he didn't try to confine me to bed without computer access like he did this time. But Anderson decided to punish me for trying to escape. She took away most of everything I owned and then tried to take my privacy away too. Anyway, I _did_ tell them. I had no intention of trying it again, not right then-- for one thing, Medellin reminded me of why I was bothering to stay alive at all, and for another, things got easier after that. It was security that saved my life, after all. It felt like the crisis had passed."

T'Laren nodded slowly. "Now I understand. I had been wondering for some time-- as I said, that attempt had always seemed like some sort of gesture to me. But it was a test, wasn't it?"

"A test?"

"You believed that security was out to kill you. If that were so, you would be better off dead at your own hands-- but you didn't truly wish to die. So you attempted suicide in such a fashion that security would almost certainly find you before your death. If they saved you, it would prove that you'd been wrong, they weren't out to kill you, and therefore you could afford to live. If they didn't... then you were right, and you would rather be dead." She nodded again. "Logical, actually-- surprisingly so. Were you consciously aware of what you were doing?"

"I... don't think so." Q tried to remember if he'd ever reasoned along the lines she described. "I'm not entirely sure that that _is_ what I did, T'Laren. I mean, I would like to believe it was-- it's always gratifying to think I had a good reason for doing something that everyone thought was stupid-- and the testing aspect certainly sounds like me. If anyone would put his life on the line to test someone else, it would be me. But I don't actually remember thinking things out the way you describe. I just wanted an end to the fear. I didn't really understand that I wouldn't die quickly enough to avoid being rescued."

"But you didn't actually want to die. You wanted to be able to relax, and you were willing to die for it if you had to, but you didn't genuinely want death."

"That's true, yes."

"I imagine your subconscious mind is as capable of setting up a test as your conscious, considering how long you've been testing people. I believe you that you didn't reason things out, but you had been mortal for two years by that time-- two years in which you suffered a tremendous amount of damage. Even if you weren't consciously aware of how much damage it would take to kill you, or how quickly you'd die of a given injury, I suspect your subconscious mind has a much better idea than you think it does. I think on some level you _did_ know you wouldn't die quickly, and you were counting on that." She frowned. "Which then leaves the question, when did you become genuinely suicidal?"

"I could have told you that I wasn't really suicidal when I cut my wrists. Not in the sense I was this last time. But when it changed... I really have no idea. I think it went back and forth for several months, and finally settled down on 'die' about two weeks before I actually did it."

"Why the time lag, then?"

"Mustering up the nerve." He grinned sardonically. "And trying to find some method that was just as sure as drinking acid and a lot less painful. I really didn't want to go through that much pain; I just couldn't find any other options."

"You described a feeling of tremendous relief when you tried to kill yourself the second time. Did you also experience any relief this last time?"

Q considered that. "Not really. I was in too much pain. I was relieved when I realized I was losing consciousness, but before that... I just kept thinking over and over, 'This will pass soon. It'll be over soon.'"

"Did you regret it, then? After you'd already taken the acid, and the pain began, did you have second thoughts?"

"Not about killing myself, no. I do recall thinking that there had to have been an easier way than this... but I wasn't actually thinking anything very coherent right then, if you want to know the truth."

"Yes. I can imagine." T'Laren stood up. "This sounds strange to say about one whom I am treating for a suicide attempt, especially one as extreme as yours, but I've come to the conclusion that you actually have a much stronger will to live than anyone, yourself included, gives you credit for." She turned. "You've told both Medellin and myself, at length, exactly what reasons you have to feel suicidal, and I must admit they're potent ones. I can imagine few sentient beings who, when faced with being'crippled, maimed and exiled' to live among aliens they are socially incompatible with, condemned to a fraction of their natural lifespan and to suffer pain far greater than they'd ever known, would not contemplate suicide as a viable option. In the past three years, you've made three attempts... and yet, when one analyzes those attempts closely, you did not become genuinely and deeply suicidal until shortly before this past time. The first time was a sudden overwhelming depression, probably brought on in part by backlash from the battle with the Borg; the second time was an attempt to escape what you believed would be a far worse death in the very near future... It took you three years of what you describe as utter misery before you became entirely convinced you wanted to die, and less than three weeks after the attempt the thought of being killed terrified you."

"Oh. Well, the thought of dying _always_ terrified me, when I wasn't actively seeking it out."

"You sound as if you're ashamed of that."

"Should I be proud of being a sniveling coward? Be realistic, T'Laren."

"Define 'sniveling coward'."

"Me. Someone who's constantly terrified, who whines and begs because he's afraid he's going to die."

"Most people are afraid to die, Q. It's perfectly normal to be frightened of death, especially for someone who's had so little time to come to terms with it. I think you're comparing yourself to Starfleet personnel-- who are disciplined and trained to deal with the possibility of their own deaths, and who have voluntarily placed themselves on the line. You didn't volunteer to be endangered. And with all that, you know, you have occasionally transcended your fears-- it was not the act of a coward to try to give yourself up to the Calamarain, back when you first became human, you know."

"Oh, I know that... but that was different." He sat down, weary of pacing; his legs were beginning to ache. "The first time the Calamarain attacked me was the first time I'd been truly faced with the possibility of my own death. I'd come close, once or twice in the past-- someone once threatened to neutralize me in such a fashion that I might as well have been dead, and then there was the time Azi tried to tear me apart... but no, this was really the first time I'd been faced with death. At first I didn't quite understand that I was in mortal danger. It felt like... like pins and needles all throughout my body, with occasional electric shocks, or like insects crawling all over me-- I kept thinking I could brush it off, get it off me, but of course it was energy. It wouldn't go until the _Enterprise_ adjusted its shields. And then... I felt violently dizzy, and I couldn't stay on my feet. I fell on the floor, drowning in waves of dizziness and nausea, and I realized for the first time that I might actually be dying. And it... that thought, the fear, was more painful than the attack itself. When Crusher showed up, I kept asking her if I was dying, begging her not to let me die. I'm sure she thought I was an idiot." He considered. "I take that back. I _know_ she thought I was an idiot. There's never been any love lost between Dr. Crusher and me.

"I managed to get myself under control before I had to face Picard again... mostly. I was trying very hard not to think about the future, narrowing my focus on getting through the next few minutes. Because if I thought about the fact that I could now die, that chances were not poor that I _would_ die, very shortly, it would overwhelm me. But after it attacked me the second time, and Data was injured in saving me... I couldn't stop thinking about it. The fact of my own mortality had imprinted itself, and I couldn't get it out of my head. I'd come awfully close to dying... and the _Enterprise_ couldn't save me and the planet they were trying to rescue at the same time, which effectively meant everyone was going to be killed... That would be stupid. Sacrificing everyone else so that I could live a few years might have been a viable option, but sacrificing everyone so that I could live another half day wasn't. I realized that I'd miscalculated, and that because of it I'd put myself in a situation where I couldn't survive. And if I had to die anyway, I might as well do so without taking a large number of irrelevant mortals with me." He shook his head. "Plus, while I didn't want to _die_, I most certainly wasn't thrilled with the notion of being alive right then. I was sure I would never adjust to being mortal and that I was setting myself up for a life of misery and agony by remaining alive. If I'd felt better about my life, I might never have been able to do it."

"That doesn't change the fact that it was not the act of a coward."

"No, maybe not. But..." He made an exasperated sigh. "How do you mortals _do_ it? If I think about the fact that-- barring my reinstatement, which I really don't think will happen-- I'm inevitably going to die, it overwhelms me. It makes my current state of existence seem pointless. How do you handle knowing that you're going to die?"

"Most humans don't. They deny it, or they don't think about it."

"I suppose Vulcans are perfectly well adjusted to the concept of death."

"Most adult Vulcans have come to terms with their own mortality, yes." She sat down. "For one thing, the discipline of logic requires self-knowledge, and facing facts. Ideally, Vulcans are not supposed to deny truths to themselves. In practice, of course, many do. But all Vulcan adults have faced the _Kahs-wan_\-- a rite of passage that can be fatal-- in childhood, and were thus forced to face their own mortality very young. And besides, Vulcans cheat."

"By blocking their emotions?"

"No, I mean we cheat at death. A dying Vulcan can-- and will, if he or she has the opportunity to do so-- transfer his or her consciousness, memories-- soul, if you will-- into another receptacle, either another sentient being or a recording media we developed for the purpose ten thousand years ago. This is called the _katra_. Normally, aged Vulcans who sense that it is time to die transfer their _katra_ into a specially trained healer, who then goes to the Hall of and transfers the _katra_ to a recording receptacle. Telepaths can commune with such receptacles. Thus, over three-quarters of all dying Vulcans do not entirely die." She looked away, staring into space. "I think sometimes that makes it harder for Vulcans to accept the notion of violent, sudden death. It is as if a devout Christian were to die in a fashion that he believed would destroy his immortal soul-- it negates the concept of the afterlife. Sometimes I think the Vulcans that enter Starfleet, where the odds are overwhelmingly high that their _katras_ will be lost if they die, are the bravest of all the species."

"Such modesty."

"I'm not speaking of myself. I came to terms with my own mortality long before I ever heard of a _katra_, or had any idea that some Vulcans can cheat death." She looked back at him. "My mother died when I was four, before I had any notion what death was. My Aunt Helene and Uncle Mike took me in and told me they would have to be my mom and dad now, because my mother had died, but I didn't understand. I asked when she was coming back, where she had gone. They told me she'd gone to Heaven, a wonderful place, and she wasn't coming back. But I loved my mother deeply, and despite the fact that Vulcans don't talk about such things, I knew she loved me. I knew if she had gone to a wonderful place she would come back to get me and bring me there to join her. So I continued to ask when she was coming back until I finally sensed that it disturbed the adults, and stopped. But I still was secretly convinced that she would. When we went to Earth, I was very apprehensive-- Earth was a much bigger place than the starship, I knew, and I wondered if my mother would be able to find me there.

"In the first year or so on Earth, we lived in New York, not Texas. There are a vast quantity of squirrels in New York, and I found them fascinating. Animals had always been rare and exotic things for me, the sight of them a special treat, and the fact that I had small animals in my back yard thrilled me. I used to try to entice them to my hand by bringing them nuts-- and cheese; somehow I'd gotten it into my head that squirrels liked cheese. I think I was mixing them up with mice." Her expression came close to a wry smile.

"One day I found a squirrel that wasn't moving. It was curled up on its side, its lips drawn back and its teeth protruding. I thought it looked sick. Perhaps it was sleeping, I thought, and I poked it to wake it up, but it wouldn't wake. So I carried it to my 'mom'-- I called Helene Dorset 'mom', but to me it didn't mean mother, because I still knew my own mother would come back for me-- and asked her what was wrong with it. She told me it was dead. Its soul had gone to squirrel heaven, but its body would never move again.

"That was when I realized what had happened to my mother. I could see her in my imagination, as lifeless and unmoving as this squirrel, all the essence of her gone away forever. She was never coming back. That was what death was.

"And even though I knew that Vulcans weren't supposed to, I cried hysterically as I finally understood that I would never see her again."

"How old were you?" Q asked.

"Five. In Earth years. Vulcan children grow up a bit more slowly than human children in many respects, so in human terms I was probably the equivalent of a four-year-old." She folded her hands in her lap. "I went about for months after that asking questions about death. When I realized that someday I, too, would be dead like my mother, I found the concept overwhelming and morbidly fascinating. My poor foster parents must have thought I was seriously disturbed. That was around the time we moved to Texas. I started seeing my Vulcan tutor then, and he helped me come to terms with the notion of death. He told me nothing about _katras_. By the time I learned that, as a Vulcan, I could escape the death of my mind when my body died, I was already quite comfortable with the notion of my own mortality. I assumed that I would die away from other Vulcans, and as inflicting a _katra_ on a non-telepath can damage the host's sanity, I had decided that I would not do the transference unless there was a Vulcan to transfer to. So the preservation of the _katra_ didn't apply to me, and I ignored it as a consideration. But it amazes me still that Vulcans who grow up with that security can find the courage to enter Starfleet, and risk their lives far away from other Vulcans."

"I can imagine. It amazes me, too. Especially since I have some personal experience with what it's like to face death after growing up immune." Q grew pensive. "I became somewhat morbidly obsessed myself when I first turned mortal, though I like to think I was a bit better controlled about it than you describe yourself at five. I still am, actually-- I think about death constantly. That I could stop _being_, that there could be an end and then there would be no more me-- it's difficult to grasp that. I have a much better idea than most mortals what death entails, and I still can't quite grasp it. It's so... big. And I'm used to dealing with big concepts... but this one floors me."

"Why do you have a better idea what death entails?"

"Well, I used to know exactly what mortal death entailed, and how various species varied in their forms of death, where the dead go and what they do-- I was practically omniscient, after all. Concepts as vast as death were easy for me to comprehend, once. But I can't quite remember... I know there is a form of existence for most life forms after death. That there is something analogous to what humans call a soul, and that it survives the destruction of the body. But the manner of that existence is nothing a human mind can comprehend. That which we think of as ourselves, our personalities, our memories, our identities-- that doesn't survive, most of the time. And I don't remember what _does_. I can't _grasp_ it any more." An old frustration welled up. "It's like a dream that you forgot. Occasionally there's a flash of something, reminding you, and for just a moment you hold the memory in your mind... but you can't attach it to words, and it's gone. It's terribly ironic, really-- I understood death back when I had no need to, when it had nothing to do with me, and now that it's a vitally important topic to me I don't remember what death is."

"At least you know there is some form of afterlife. That's more than most mortals do."

"But it doesn't help. If my personality doesn't survive, then is that me? I can't answer that anymore. As far as I know, death could still be the obliteration of everything I am. And that is an almost incomprehensible concept. How could I stop existing? I can remember the beginning of the _universe_\-- how can the universe go on without _me_?"

"You were around when the universe began?"

"No. And actually, I don't remember the beginning of the universe-- that was something I knew through the Continuum, so I've lost it now. But I remember that I used to remember." He shook his head. "At least you mortals can point to a time when you hadn't existed yet, and analogize a time when you no longer exist from that. I don't even really know how old I am. I can't remember my own creation anymore, though I remember that I used to. I think I can safely say that I wasn't around when most of the solar systems around us formed, but I can't remember for sure. I cannot positively identify a time before I existed, so how can I comprehend a time when I will no longer be?"

"I don't know." T'Laren clasped her hands on the table. "But few mortals can. We can intellectually comprehend ceasing to exist, but we can't truly understand it."

"And then there's method." Q got up and began to pace again. "Death might not bother me so much if it weren't for the fact that dying is so unpleasant. I think about dying even more than I think about death. See, dying I can comprehend. I have a lot of experience with dying. It's actually being dead that I can't handle. But the fact that I understand dying and have experience with it doesn't mean I like the idea of doing it, and someday I'm going to have to. I waste my time making up lists of what qualities I most want my death to have-- as if I'm going to be given any choice in the matter."

"You might," T'Laren said. "Often one can have some control over the manner of one's death. It depends on the circumstances." She steepled her hands and rested her chin on them. "What sort of qualities do you mean?"

"Well." This was a decidedly morbid conversation, and Q found himself wondering exactly how they'd gotten onto this topic. It did give him a certain kind of perverse satisfaction to be discussing it-- as he'd told T'Laren, death was something he thought about an inordinate amount, but he rarely got a chance to talk to anyone seriously about it. "My ideal death would be completely painless and fairly short, but not instantaneous. I would like to know what's happening, to have a chance to observe-- it is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, after all." He smiled sardonically. "A chance to say my goodbyes, assuming there's anyone there to say them to-- and I would prefer not to be alone when I die-- to make my peace with my existence, that sort of thing. Ideally, somewhere between fifteen minutes and a few hours-- longer than that and I'd get bored.

"If there's pain involved, of any sort, then I'd like it to be quick. Obviously, the more pain there is, the shorter I'd like it to last. Dying of a stab wound, for instance, I think I could stand about fifteen minutes of. If I'd lasted fifteen minutes after I drank the acid, I wouldn't have been sane after Li rescued me-- something like that has to be _very_ short.

"And if it has to be painful and long, I would like it to be meaningful." He stopped and stared out at the stars through the transparent wall. "If I _had_ died when I offered myself up to the Calamarain, it wouldn't have been pleasant, but at least it would have accomplished a purpose. I'm not eager to become a martyr, and I'm far too selfish to try to be a hero, but I think it would be nice to know that I wasn't dying in vain. That someone else would live or thrive, someone better suited to the life they're living than I am to this."

"Those are fairly understandable preferences," T'Laren said.

"But it's not going to happen that way." Q circled around the table and sat down again, arms folded in against himself. "I can't fool myself, as much as I might want to. I'm going to die horribly, all dignity gone, screaming and probably begging, for no better reason than someone's fixation on vengeance. If I'm very lucky, they'll finish me off quickly, but I probably won't be."

"You can't know that."

"You're right. I don't _know_ how I'm going to die. But when I extrapolate from all the times I've almost died in the past three years, it becomes obvious that the overwhelming statistical trend is toward really unpleasant deaths. About the only way to give myself good odds at a reasonably acceptable method of shuffling off this mortal coil is to shuffle it off myself." Maybe it had been a bad idea to discuss this. He felt the despair encroaching on him again. "It just seems so hopeless. Even when I don't want to die, it's so obvious that a suicide death is probably the best I can hope for. It makes an early check-out seem very attractive sometimes."

"You can't spend your life dwelling on the inevitability of death, Q."

"I told you I was a coward."

T'Laren frowned. "You have a habit of putting the most negative connotations possible on any given circumstance."

"If I've learned one thing in my millions of years, it's that pessimists are rarely disappointed."

"They are also rarely happy."

"I'd rather be unhappy and wise than a gleeful fool."

"Pessimism is hardly wisdom. If you spend your entire life dwelling on the horror of your own death, you will not evade it-- as you've said, your death is probably out of your control. You will merely make yourself miserable."

"How am I supposed to turn it off? I'm not a Vulcan, I can't just stop thinking about things that bother me."

"You can. If thoughts that disturb you intrude, think about something else. And take matters into your own control as much as you can. If you learn self-defense, for instance, you may be able to save yourself from being killed-- or at the least force your attacker to finish you quickly. You probably can't make peace with most of the beings that want you dead, but you can increase the odds that you'll be defended successfully by learning not to antagonize your protectors. You were very clever in turning to Starfleet for protection, but even members of Starfleet can be pushed too far-- as you've learned. If you'd been able to manage social relations properly, Security would not have attacked you for Ohmura's death, you wouldn't have suffered for two weeks in fear, you would not have been compelled to attempt your own life, and you would not have been punished for the attempt if you had. All of that because you handle people badly. Learn better techniques for dealing with your allies, and you will be-- and feel-- much safer."

As usual, her argument made perfect logical sense. As usual, Q didn't believe her, though he couldn't put his finger on exactly why not. It seemed impossible that he would ever be able to make himself likable. "I doubt it."

"You doubt everything, Q. It's your nature." T'Laren stood up. "You must, at least, concede that learning self-defense would increase your probable life-span, and decrease the probability of death by torture?"

It was hard to argue with that one. "If I _can_ learn, then yes, I suppose it would."

"You can learn," she told him confidently. "If you truly wish to learn, you will."

He sighed. "Sometimes... I don't know why. This sounds utterly foolish, especially given how I've been whining about how afraid I am for the past few hours... but sometimes it seems like it's easier to be afraid than to hope anything could get better, or work to fix anything."

"I'm sure it is easier. Less effort. What you need to decide for yourself, Q, is what your priorities are. Do you truly want to get well? Do you want to stop being afraid? And do you want those things badly enough to work for them?"

If someone killed him in the next few months, and he thought there was any chance T'Laren's training could have saved him if he'd paid attention, Q would feel very stupid. "I think so," he said. "At least, right now." He stood up. "I skipped most of my lessons today. Any chance you might be willing to finish them?"

T'Laren raised an eyebrow and stood herself. She seemed unable or unwilling to keep her surprise off her face-- Q smiled sardonically at her expression-- but all she said was "Certainly."

* * *

That night, despite attempts to meditate, he awakened four times with bad dreams. The fourth time, he woke up drenched with sweat, the blankets thrown off his upper body and hopelessly tangled around his legs.

"This," Q said to no one in particular, "is positively ridiculous."

He kicked free of the blankets furiously, the fear of the dream transmuting to anger. So much for T'Laren's insistence that all he needed to do was relax. He'd been perfectly relaxed before he went to sleep-- actually, he'd been exhausted. He'd tried her method, had done the meditative exercises she suggested, and it hadn't worked. Without bothering to do anything about his rumpled appearance, he stormed out of the bedroom and headed for Deck 1, where T'Laren's quarters were. It was 0500; by all rights, she should be asleep by now. Well, good. He'd wake her up. If he couldn't sleep, why should she?

T'Laren's quarters were unlocked. They were also empty. The hard mattress she slept on-- or at least he presumed she slept on it-- was made up as a militarily precise bunk, with no sign that someone had ever slept there, or even leaned on it. "Computer, where's T'Laren?"

"T'Laren is in the gymnasium."

In the gymnasium at 0500. _Why am I not surprised?_ He headed back down to Deck 3, his fury cooling slightly with time. The ridiculousness of his actions, storming around _Ketaya_ in his pajamas because he had a bad dream, started to reach him. Resolutely he forced himself to concentrate on anger, to ignore the growing sense of embarrassment and focus on finding T'Laren.

As he stepped into the gymnasium, he staggered and nearly fell. It was like walking off a staircase without realizing there was a final step to descend. A sudden weight settled over his entire body, making it hard to breathe, and an intense heat brought beads of sweat to his face in the first few seconds-- beads that evaporated quickly in the dry air. It wasn't hard to deduce that T'Laren had set the interior to a Vulcan environment, heavy gravity, heat and all. Didn't she know it was a bad idea to have differential gravities aboard a ship in warp? He leaned a hand against the wall to regain his balance, breathing deeply, and stepped forward from the antechamber into the gym proper.

T'Laren was working out on a complex jungle gym of parallel bars, wearing a blue-grey gym suit that wasn't much larger than the swimsuit she'd worn before. Her skin was flushed a dark green, under a sheen of sweat. As Q watched, she wrapped her legs around one of the bars, swung around it, and tried to do a handstand onto the bars below. Her wrist twisted as her weight came on it, and she fell with a startled yelp, crashing on her hands and knees to the mats below.

Q clapped slowly and sarcastically. "Bra-_vo_!"

T'Laren got up from the mat slowly, turning to face him. "I didn't hear you come in."

"No, you seemed rather occupied with finding new and exciting ways to maim yourself."

"Are you here for a reason? It's very early." She stood up, wiping sweat off her face.

"I thought I'd take in a sauna," he said, glancing around. "Why exactly are you exercising in Vulcan gravity at five in the morning?"

"Why exactly are you asking?" T'Laren went over to the replicator. "A tall glass of water. And a wet cloth." She was limping slightly, favoring her left knee.

"I do believe I asked first."

She drank most of the glass of water in one draught. "I always exercise around this time. Normally you're asleep at this time. Another glass of water, please."

"Where's the logic in being polite to a replicator?"

"What are you doing here?"

Q leaned back against the wall. The gravity was very tiring. "I just woke up for the fourth time tonight with another nightmare, and I want to know what you plan to do about it."

"Ah." T'Laren set her second glass of water down and wiped off her face with the wet cloth, both times using the wrist that hadn't betrayed her. "We could discuss it, if you'd like."

"T'Laren, I'm _tired_. I don't want to discuss it, I _want_ to get back to sleep."

"Did you try meditation?"

He gave her a disgusted look. "No, I thought I'd try banging my head on the wall instead."

"What kind of nightmare was it?"

"It doesn't _matter_ what kind of nightmare it was! You told me that if I was properly relaxed I wouldn't have nightmares. Well, I did the relaxation exercises before I went to bed and it didn't do me any good at all. I even tried them again after the first nightmare. I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that you, dear doctor, are a quack. Why don't you give me a sedative? We _know_ that works."

"I could also use a nerve pinch on you," T'Laren said coolly. "That would work, too."

"You're not taking me seriously!" Q snapped.

T'Laren pressed a hand to her head. "Forgive me. I'm angry and frustrated at the moment-- it has nothing to do with you, although your behavior is not improving matters."

"_My_ behavior isn't improving matters. I see. You're the one who's supposed to be helping me, and I'm the one who's suffering, but you don't feel good. Oh. Poor baby."

"You are the only one permitted to be angry?" T'Laren asked. "You're the only one permitted to have any sort of feelings?"

"You're a Vulcan! And anyway, you're my doctor. You're supposed to be able to put personal problems aside."

"Ideally, yes. Here's some news for you, though: this isn't an ideal universe."

Q scowled. "I know that. Don't try to tell _me_ about the shortcomings of the universe, T'Laren."

"Then you know that it isn't always possible to live up to ideals." T'Laren leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes. "Give me a moment."

She took a deep breath. Q watched, fascinated despite himself. Her tension had not been all that obvious, not to a person used to reading human beings, but the change as it drained out of her was dramatic. When she opened her eyes, she seemed entirely composed, her face and voice free of the edge of impatience that had been there before. "There."

"I've never seen a Vulcan do that before."

"Aside from me, you probably never will again. Most have mastery internalized far better than I do-- it would take something of truly stunning proportions to make them show emotion, or the struggle for control."

"Vulcans don't usually admit that they even _have_ emotions."

"I know. It's a matter of shame. I've always felt that there's no point to it myself; denying my feelings exist will not help me to master them. Vulcan discipline doesn't work by pretending emotions aren't there and hoping they go away, though many humans seem to think that's how we do it."

"What were you exercising in a Vulcan gravity for, anyway?"

"You're the physics expert, Q. What do you think?"

"I think having a differential gravity field inside our warp field is asking for trouble, actually."

"Oh." T'Laren frowned slightly. "Why?"

"It's unstable. If you've got multiple gravitational fields inside a single warp envelope, it unbalances the warp field, puts a strain on the engines and drains the dilithium crystals. Admittedly, dilithium can be recharged, but if we ever do plan to use the transwarp engines we'll want crystals at maximum capacity, so they don't blow out on us."

"We used higher-than-Earth-gee fields for gymnasium programs aboard some of the starships I was on, and no one ever said it was dangerous."

"Starships have more sheer power to play with. Our engines are designed for speed, not luxury. Also more space-- the proportionate size of the differential gravity field makes a big difference. And I still don't know what you'd want such a program for."

"I was born aboard a starship under Earth gee, and raised on Earth. Earth's gravity is considerably lighter than Vulcan's." She requested a medical tricorder from the replicator and ran it over her wrist. "You think of me as strong, because I'm a Vulcan and I'm stronger than you. In point of fact, though, at your size you would be stronger than me if you were in reasonable shape."

"Really." Q's eyebrows went up.

"I've always been weaker than other Vulcans. For most of my life, I struggled to compensate, with exercise regimens like the one you just saw. Since I _am_ genetically Vulcan, and Earth's gravity isn't that much lower, I can come very close to a normal Vulcan level of strength for a woman my size if I train hard enough. But toward the end... I let things slide, and I'm paying for it now." She put the tricorder down. "It's twisted, not sprained. I'll have to do something about it later, and the knee too. Right now, though... let me take a shower, and I'll try to deal with your problem. I should only be a few minutes."

"I'll wait outside."

After the heat in the gymnasium (and why did she have it set to a complete Vulcan environment if all she wanted was the heavier gravity, anyway?), the coolness of the ship's corridors was a soothing balm. Q leaned against the wall, growing more and more conscious of his rumpled appearance. What had possessed him to come out here in _pajamas_? What was _wrong_ with him? His hair was a wreck, he had been drenched with sweat before he'd gone in the gymnasium and he probably reeked by now-- really, he must look a disaster. He thought of going back to his room to get changed before she got out-- T'Laren probably didn't care what he looked like, but he did.

She came out then, wearing a dull beige shipsuit, her hair still slightly damp. Personally, Q couldn't see why anyone would dump water all over themselves when they could be cleaned with intangible, efficient sound waves instead, but he was willing to admit that was a personal bias. "I've been considering," she said as they walked toward his room. "I still think the problem is tension-- especially since yesterday morning. You look as if you're tense and frightened when you sleep, even under sedation-- I imagine you must be extremely tense when you don't take sedatives. You say you've tried meditation, and that didn't work. We tried massage, and that didn't work very well. I still disapprove of sedatives-- I could give you a muscle relaxant, but over the long run that has the same problem as the sedatives."

"None of this helps, you know." Q palmed open the door to his room.

"All of it helps. Knowing what does not work is certainly useful in tracking down what does." T'Laren stepped inside and sat down in the chair, folding her hands in her lap, as Q sat down on the bed and leaned back against his pillows. "We haven't yet tried combining techniques. Perhaps you're too tense to place yourself in a deep enough trance to do youself good. I could massage the tension out while you make the attempt..."

"I'm certainly not going to turn down a gratuitous backrub, but I don't really think that will work. For one thing, I doubt I could concentrate enough to try meditating with you rubbing my back."

"You might be surprised. Actually, anything that relaxes the body increases suggestibility, and that improves the odds for self-hypnosis-- which is, essentially, what I've been trying to teach you to do."

"I'm not too happy with the idea of being suggestible, quite frankly."

"I know. Some time ago I considered the idea of using hypnosis with you, but I think you're far too resistant for it to work. You refuse to yield your will to someone else. However, keep in mind that it's your subconscious mind that's affected by increased suggestibility. We have been trying to find a way to make your subconscious-- which seems to be as stubborn as the rest of you-- take orders from your conscious mind. I'm sure the idea of you yourself giving suggestions to your subconscious doesn't disturb you."

"Of course not. That's not what bothers me..." But he couldn't quite articulate what bothered him, other than the usual problem-- he simply didn't want to take the risk of letting another person manipulate him, and in these circumstances that was a foolish fear to have. Right now he would use any method at all. He shook his head. "I'm too tired to have this argument. I suppose it would be foolish of me not to try it."

"Yes."

By now he had become somewhat more accustomed to backrubs-- he enjoyed them still, but no longer overreacted the way he had the first time. Which was just as well, as if he'd kept overreacting like that he would have had to refuse them entirely. He lay down on the bed, on his stomach with his head turned sideways on the pillow and his arms under the pillow, supporting his head. For a moment, he was uncomfortably aware of the fact that he was in a pair of light, rumpled pajamas, with his feet bare, and that he was in his bedroom with T'Laren. The fact that she was fully dressed helped ease the self-consciousness some, though, and when she began on his back it felt too good to particularly care about what he was wearing or how vulnerable he was.

It was, however, far too distracting for him to put himself in a trance. In an environment of boredom, it was very easy for Q to put himself into a trance-- when he was too physically weary to do anything and didn't want to sleep, he could use meditation as a method of simply shutting his brain off for a while. Using it for something constructive, however, like trying to persuade himself to not have nightmares, was much more difficult. He simply couldn't do it here. For one thing, with T'Laren pressing down on his back he couldn't breathe deeply or regularly. "This isn't going to work," he said, rolling over.

"What's wrong?"

"It's too distracting. And I can't breathe properly."

"Mm." T'Laren nodded. "All right. Roll over again and I'll finish with your back. Then there's something else we could try."

"What?"

"An adaptation of this. If you lay on your back, I can still reach most of your head and neck. As long as your back is relaxed already, that might be enough."

That sounded rather attractive, he had to admit. "Fine."

After she had finished with his back, she had him move down on the bed, far enough for her to kneel at the head of the bed just above his head, and lie down on his back with his head supported on a pillow, leaving a space free that she could reach his neck. His exhaustion was catching up with him. "I want you to take deep breaths," T'Laren said. "Try to relax. Since ideally you should go directly to sleep when we finish here, would you like me to turn off the lights?"

The idea of being in a completely dark room with T'Laren bothered him more than he was willing to admit. Besides, he didn't sleep in complete darkness anyway. "Computer, sleep lights."

The room dimmed, the regular lights going off and the three blue panels at the base of the room's walls lighting up, filling the room with a dim, diffuse illumination. "I didn't know there were moon lights on _Ketaya_," T'Laren said.

"Is that what they're called? Moon lights?"

"Either that or nightlights."

"I hate the term nightlight. Children who're frightened of the dark use nightlights. I just prefer to be able to see if something wakes me up."

"Reasonable, given your circumstances." She reached under his neck and pressed fingertips into the muscles there. "Close your eyes."

Q did so, sighing. It was a good bit easier to breathe deeply, now that he wasn't being pressed down into the bed. It was strange, how his neck and head could be so tense, and yet he didn't even notice he was in pain until something happened to take the pain away. He hated being that used to pain that it dropped into the background-- though maybe it was preferable to the way it had been in the early days, when he couldn't stop noticing pain, and a twinge he would now consider negligible would have him all but crippled.

As T'Laren's fingertips moved up to his temples, massaging the barely-noticed headache away, he could hear her murmuring almost inaudibly, soothingly, telling him to relax. Sleep was a warm, dark tide, lapping at him and washing away the strains of the day. He was tired enough that the sensation of falling asleep was in itself extremely pleasurable, something it very rarely was-- normally he fought sleep, resisting the onslaught of unconsciousness with all his strength, but he had no strength right now and it felt wonderful to yield for once.

His breathing changed, becoming more regular. Quite unconsciously he smiled as the dark tide took him and washed everything away but peace.

* * *

T'Laren waited with her fingers pressed gently to his temples, sensing and guiding the ebb of consciousness, until she knew that he was deeply and peacefully asleep. Though it was difficult to imagine a mind more resistant to suggestion than his, she thought that perhaps he had been receptive enough to her telepathic suggestion to act on it. If this worked, he would sleep deeply and with no emotionally charged dreams. She drew back her hands and cautiously removed herself from the bed, prepared to soothe Q back to sleep if he showed any signs of being woken by her movements. He showed none.

For a few moments she stood by the bed, looking down at him in the dim bluish light. With the tension gone from his sleeping form, his lips turned in an unconscious smile, he actually looked healthier than he had this morning, when he'd slept so tensely. He was still thin and fragile-looking, still vulnerable, but it was a far more innocent vulnerability than the knowing fear she'd seen in him this morning, and it inspired a kind of tender protectiveness-- even in her, with her extensive knowledge of what exactly he was. If he ever managed to look this way when awake, he'd have a much easier time of it getting people to be sympathetic to him.

She left the room, heading for sickbay. It had, perhaps, been a bad idea to give Q a massage after twisting her wrist. Her priorities were strange ones, she thought. Few doctors were ever quite so obsessed with their patients as she was-- and she had to admit that an objective observer would probably call it obsession. For three or four months, ever since Lhoviri and she had decided she was sane enough to work again, she had spent most of her waking hours thinking about and preparing for her treatment of Q. She had interviewed people who knew him, studied his records extensively, done everything she could to increase her understanding of him. T'Laren had never been that focused on one patient before in her life, nor had she ever known a doctor who was-- except in cases of countertransference, where the psychologist fell in love with her patient.

__

_Small danger of that here_

_, she thought dryly. As far as he'd come in the past two weeks, Q was still far from lovable. She was obsessed with him because he was the symbol of her debt to Lhoviri, the service she must discharge for the profound gift of having reality rewritten to correct her mistakes. That was all._

That being said, however, she had to admit that that in itself could be a problem. Until Q was reasonably well-adjusted to being human, until she had completed the task Lhoviri had given her, T'Laren could not entirely forgive herself for the things she had done, the things Lhoviri had saved her from doing. There was nothing she could do about that-- emotional mastery only went so far, and besides, Lhoviri had altered reality in order to pay for a psychologist who would obsess herself with his younger brother. That was part of the deal. But it meant she would have to watch herself carefully-- despite what she'd told Q today, the lack of other people around was a problem, though not for the reason he thought. It was not that Q was not the most charming of companions-- he wasn't, but that wasn't the point. If the only social connections T'Laren could make were with the patient that she was obsessed with anyway, she became dangerously vulnerable to countertransference. Probably his unlovability and obnoxiousness were all that had saved her thus far. As she shaped Q into a closer approximation of a socially viable and likable human, she ran the risk of becoming Pygmalion, and falling for her creation. She would have to be constantly on guard for that.

It would be better once they were on _Yamato_, she thought. Once there were other people around to diffuse her focus.

* * *

She let Q sleep this time-- it was probably the first night in years that he'd gotten a decent night's sleep without the aid of sedatives. As a result, it was close to 0930 hours before he finally came onto the bridge, fully dressed and with defenses firmly in place. "I want to talk to you," he said abruptly.

T'Laren stood. "Did you sleep well?"

"Marvelously. I haven't slept this well without sedatives since the night we defeated the Borg. I didn't even wake up groggy. And that is what I want to talk to you about." He strode over and perched himself on the railing nearest her. "What did you do to me?"

Her heart sank at his phrasing. She had used telepathic suggestion on him because it was the most effective way to get him to sleep, it was a lot less dangerous than sedatives and she didn't think there was any way he would figure it out. Q had an irrationally powerful phobia of telepathy-- if she had suggested that she use her telepathy to help him sleep, they would have been in an argument for another three hours, since Q was especially incapable of listening to reason when he was tired. If somehow he had figured it out, though, they were going to have the three-hour argument now.

She could lie to him, she thought. For a Vulcan, she was remarkably good at lying-- in fact, for a human she was remarkably good at lying, though she hated to do it. But if somehow he saw through the lie, he might never trust her again. There would be an argument if she admitted the truth, and he would probably claim he couldn't trust her anymore, but that, at least, she could salvage. If she outright lied to him, and he found out, she might never recover.

"I gave you a massage," she said calmly. "And I gave you a telepathic suggestion to help you sleep."

Q stared at her, hard. "I'm surprised you're willing to admit it."

"Why shouldn't I admit it? You wanted desperately to sleep."

"And you took advantage of that to get access to my mind, didn't you."

"That has to be one of the most outrageously paranoid things I've ever heard you say. I did not 'get access' to your mind, Q. I admit I used my telepathy to suggest that you sleep. If you hadn't been exhausted and very much desirous of sleep, however, the suggestion would have had no effect whatsoever. I can't make you do anything against your will, and while I _can_ read your mind, I would have had to meld with you to do so. The most I can sense without forming a mindmeld is general emotional state."

"My, aren't we defensive."

"Of course I'm defensive. You just accused me of one of the greatest crimes a Vulcan can commit. I believe I have the right to be defensive."

Q shook his head. "To be quite honest, I believe you. But that doesn't change the fact that you invaded my mind without my permission--"

"You _gave_ me permission, Q. You were desperate for anything that would help you get to sleep."

"And is a telepathic suggestion that great an improvement over a sedative? That's what _I_ wanted."

"You told me you awoke without grogginess. Sedatives depress your system even after you wake. Besides, as I've pointed out, sedatives are addictive. With a telepathic suggestion, your brain can't distinguish between the suggestion and its own impulses. Your brain develops the habit of falling asleep on what it believes to be its own--"

"Then why did I imagine I heard your voice?"

"You heard my voice?"

"When I came down here, actually, I thought you'd hypnotized me or something. I distinctly remember you murmuring at me over and over to relax, to go to sleep. Did you do that?"

"Not aloud."

"Then how do you explain how I heard it?"

"I don't know." That troubled her somewhat. Q was not a psi-sensitive; he shouldn't have been able to distinguish her suggestions from his own mental processes. "That doesn't normally happen. It could be that you have so much experience with psi, or something analogous to it. I've heard of non-psis, such as humans, learning to develop shields through close contact with telepaths. The fact that you used to be a psi within a psionic society--"

"The Q Continuum is a bit more than a psionic society, T'Laren."

"Yes, but the analogy holds."

"All of this is off the point," Q said. "You claimed I gave you permission. I gave you no such thing. You didn't warn me you were going to touch my mind, and you didn't ask my permission. What you told me, in fact, was that you intended for me to put myself to sleep, which for obvious reasons I have a lot fewer problems with than having you do it."

T'Laren allowed herself to sigh. "What was I supposed to do, Q? You wanted to go to sleep right then. You didn't want to discuss your nightmares, or meditate, or do anything constructive. You wanted to be asleep right then. The only thing I could think of to do was a telepathic suggestion."

"Then why didn't you _ask_ me?"

"Because you'd have felt compelled to argue against it for three hours."

To her surprise, Q grinned. "Probably. But I'd have lost in the end. I always lose arguments like that."

"You weren't in any mood for a three-hour argument, and frankly, neither was I."

"_Au contraire, chère docteur._ I'm always in the mood for a three-hour argument."

Belatedly she realized that Q was actually not that angry. He seemed to be arguing mostly for the sake of argument. "Q, does any of this really bother you or are you just being difficult?"

"Why, T'Laren, you wound me. Haven't I progressed beyond being difficult for the sake of being difficult?"

"No."

Q blinked in apparent surprise. "Oh. Well, I thought I had."

"You were obviously mistaken."

"I'm not just-- All right. You want me to be serious? I'll be deadly serious." His voice lost all joking tone. "I don't like having you touch my mind, T'Laren. Ever. You did it for my benefit; fine, I believe you. But you didn't ask my permission and you didn't warn me. I think I have the right to feel just a little bit betrayed over that. Especially since you knew I don't like you being inside my head."

"I can understand why you wouldn't want your mind read, Q. I can even understand why you wouldn't want me giving you suggestions all the time. And I can understand why you feel that I should have warned you. But try to look at it from my perspective. You are irrational on the subject of telepathy, and also irrational on the subject of sleep, and predisposed to be at your most stubborn and unreasonable when you're tired. I could have told you what I planned, we would have argued in circles for hours, and in the end either I would have won the argument, or you would have slept badly and demanded sedatives again today. I've told you before, you cannot entirely be trusted to know what your own best interests are."

"And so you treat me like a child? Lie to me, to make me do what you want? 'This won't hurt a bit, Q.' Is that it?"

"When you behave irrationally as a child, I have no choice--"

"T'Laren," he interrupted, "I trust you about as much as it's possible for me to trust another sentient being, I suspect. But that trust does _not_ extend to letting you make free with my mind. What is irrational about not wanting a telepath in my head? You say this was for my benefit. What if I'm depressed, and you feel it's for my benefit that you artificially alter my mood? What if I'm grieving over what I've lost again, and you think it would help me if you conditioned me not to think of my loss at all? I could have been a non-sentient animal, you know. I could have led a happy, stupid animal life, in blissful ignorance of what I used to be. That isn't what I chose. And no one else has the right to choose that for me."

T'Laren stared at him. "Q, I would _never_ do such a thing-- you're entirely right. No one has the right to choose that for you. I would never dream of trying. That would be-- tantamount to putting you on drugs, or sending you to a rehab colony. To deprive a person of their free will by telepathically altering their mind is one of the worst things any Vulcan can imagine doing. You know that Vulcans die if sent to rehab colonies? We can't bear having our minds forcibly altered any more than you can. I-- no."

"You've never used your telepathy that way. Never altered a person's mind against their will."

Against her will, T'Laren remembered Melor. "Once," she said softly. "To save my life. And I have never stopped regretting it."

"Really. What happened?"

T'Laren shook her head. "It was when I was undercover in the Romulan Empire. I was forced to remove a man's memories of discovering that I was Vulcan." She had no intention of telling Q precisely how she'd accomplished that, or why Melor had believed her enough to make himself vulnerable. Not only was it a story that shamed her, it was an aspect of her character that Q of all people should never find out.

"All right." Q nodded. "That sounds like a legitimate reason to do such a thing. I just--" He took a deep breath. "I know I can be irrational on this topic. There's nothing I can do about that. It isn't even the idea of having my mind read-- I'm sure my own people read my mind frequently. I'm primarily afraid of having my mind influenced."

"Why?" Immediately T'Laren realized that was poor phrasing. "I don't mean why-- I can easily understand why you fear having your mind influenced. I would, too. But why is it such a priority in your mind? You seem to fear this worse than... many more immediate fears. You've told me that the thing you most had to fear as a Q was having your mind influenced by the other Q. But you're human now. You're a solitary being, not part of an overmind. Having your mind influenced is not going to happen very often; I would think it would be a low-priority fear."

"Let me tell you a little story, T'Laren. Maybe this will help you understand." He got up and began to pace about, illustrating his story with hand gestures. "You're familiar with Earth mythology, fairy tales and whatnot? Good. Let's say you're the prince of a small kingdom. This is in some indeterminate once-upon-a-time era. And when you were born, an old gypsy woman made a prophecy that you could only be killed by a bear.

"Bears used to be a protected species, but no longer! Your father the king declares open season on bears. Bear hunters make fortunes selling bearskin rugs, bear meat, bear coats, all that. So by the time you grow to adulthood, bears are pretty rare. Now, you live with the fear that you might run into one one day, but it seems pretty remote. You've never actually seen a bear. And you have utter confidence that nothing else can kill you.

"You become a renowned warrior, unstoppable in battle. You take risks no one else would dare, but then, you've no reason to be afraid-- after all, your opponents aren't bears. And you do good works. You save babies from burning buildings, swim out to sea to save drowning men, all that. You're known far and wide for your bravery. Of course, it isn't bravery-- you _know_ that anything that isn't a bear presents you about as much threat as a cream puff. Less. People have choked on cream puffs.

"Then one day you make a startling discovery. That old gypsy woman was a complete charlatan! She had as much psychic ability as a lima bean. See, her husband was a bear hunter. She's filthy rich now from dead bears, and she's run to another kingdom, and you hear that she confessed that she made the prophecy up. Actually, anything can kill you.

"Overnight, you turn into a sniveling coward. You spent your life fearing nothing but bears. Now you fear _everything_, because you never learned how to handle fear. Now you know that fire can kill you, and drowning can kill you, and warriors-- oh, yes, they can certainly kill you. You're terrified of the entire world.

"But-- even now-- especially of bears."

T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "Did you make that up, or is that a myth somewhere?"

"I made it up. Although it could very well be a myth I learned somewhere, and I just don't remember it."

"It's a good analogy," she said. "I suspect it oversimplifies a bit--"

"All analogies do that."

"--but it does help to explain how you feel. However. What if for some reason you needed to rely on a bear to save your life?"

Q considered. "I'm phobic, not stupid," he said. "If you needed to mindmeld with me to save my life-- I'd agree. I wouldn't like it, but I'd agree."

"I'm glad to hear that," she said. "You may find this reassuring, Q. Or perhaps not-- but knowing you, I suspect you will. Do you understand what a mindmeld entails?"

"It's telepathy. More than that. It's a merging of minds, isn't it?"

"Yes. It's also a learned skill-- while all Vulcans are born with the ability, and all can form simple links with other willing Vulcans, it takes a great deal of skill and training to meld with an alien, or an unwilling or frightened subject. This is primarily because the mindmeld involves merging minds, becoming the other. A Vulcan needs an unshakable sense of self, a willingness to accept the unknown, or a great deal of training, to prevent her mind being submerged in her meld partner's, her own personality subsumed. I've trained in that for over 30 years-- I'm a very good telepath, with a great deal of experience at melding with aliens. And I wouldn't risk melding with you unless it was an emergency, because I suspect your personality would overwhelm mine."

"Really."

"Yes. You've trained in overwhelming others' minds for the past few million years. I suspect your force of personality is such that others would be easily absorbed into you, or destroyed by you as a defense."

"But you're a psi. I'm not."

"That only says who can initiate a meld, not who has the more powerful personality. You may be as vulnerable to having your mind read by distance telepaths as any human-- but I think any Vulcan who tried to meld with you would be risking their sanity."

"You're right. I do find that reassuring."

"And that's the basic nature of the problem, isn't it? You fear intimacy, and feel reassured by the fact that you would probably take over any mind that joined with yours. In the society you grew up in, that was a survival skill. Intimacy meant danger, in a society where it was the default. But now that you've been deprived of it, you do need it, as much as humans need independence. In fact, having taken it for granted all your life, you may in some ways need it more. And yet you haven't been able to adjust your behavior to compensate yet. You're now a member of a species whose social defaults are the opposite of what you spent millions of years learning-- and so you resist mental intimacy, you resist all but the most superficial of emotional connections, because you have not yet realized that emotional closeness is no longer dangerous to you. You're still afraid of bears."

"Yes, I know. What's your point?"

"Do you understand that it's a problem?"

"Of course I understand that it's a problem. Haven't we spent the last three weeks hashing out how it's a problem?"

"You didn't understand that it was a problem when we began this trip," T'Laren said. "You agreed to come with me because you couldn't think of anything else that might help, not because you truly understood what needed to be fixed."

Q frowned slightly, evidently thinking about it. "Maybe so."

"That's an achievement, at least." She leaned forward. "And something else you should realize. I can't make you do anything against your will. I cannot telepathically compel you to fall asleep if you don't really want to. If I tried, I would have to form a meld, and I've just explained why I wouldn't dare do that outside of emergencies. I'm not a bear, Q. You have no reason to fear me."

He sighed. "Ask my permission first, at least."

"Would you have granted it?" T'Laren asked. "Would you grant it now, if the same situation arose?"

"If I was desperate, yes."

"It takes desperation for you to realize what you need, doesn't it."

"I wouldn't have come with you in the first place if I wasn't desperate."

And so he would only admit to a need if he were desperate? And then only if offered a solution? Q had, in the past, occasionally tried to find constructive solutions to his problems by reaching out to others for information or aid-- such as asking Sekal about the Vulcan disciplines-- but for the most part he tried to solve everything himself, or else assumed it couldn't be solved and resigned himself to it. She wasn't sure he had come far enough to admit needs even to her unless she dragged the admission out of him. Which meant she would have to be diligent about dragging admissions out of him, and that brought her in roundabout fashion to a topic she'd been meaning to discuss with him for weeks, and which he'd diligently avoided.

"There is something I've been meaning to talk about with you for some time."

"About why I came with you? Or desperation?"

"Neither, actually." How to broach this. T'Laren studied him, trying to decide the best approach, and finally decided to be reasonably blunt. "I've studied Counselor Medellin's reports on your discussions of sexuality, but I've not discussed the subject with you myself."

"For which I was grateful."

"It's far too important a topic to ignore, Q."

"I was quite happy ignoring it, actually." He turned away from her, heading for the lift. "I haven't had breakfast yet anyway. I have no intention of getting into another marathon discussion before I get some food."

"I'll come with you."

"I also don't particularly feel like having a marathon discussion while eating."

"I'm sure you don't feel like having this discussion at all, but it's necessary."

"Why?"

She stepped onto the lift with him, and they descended to the kitchen level. There should be a lounge, T'Laren thought-- not the huge and ostentatious observation lounge, but something small and cozy, bigger than the kitchen-- a neutral ground of sorts. They spent all their time having discussions in the kitchen because there really weren't many other places on the ship to talk. "Sexuality is an important part of the human psyche, and for you to reject it as completely as you do is unhealthy. I need to understand why you choose to reject it--"

"Because it's _repulsive_." The lift reached Deck 3, and they both stepped off. "You said you read Medellin's reports. You must know what I told her."

"I do-- but there are a good number of things you told Counselor Medellin that you later contradicted when talking to me."

"Like what? Name one."

"I'm not going to be sidetracked, Q. Why do you consider sex so repulsive?"

"Because it is. You humanoids use your genitalia for _excretory_ functions. Have you any _idea_ how utterly grotesque that is?" He shuddered dramatically. "I'm going to eat now. I would appreciate it if we could stop talking about this, so I might have some chance of keeping my breakfast down."

She waited until he'd ordered his breakfast-- eggs, bacon, and, in typical Q perversity, a chocolate sundae. "That's the sort of objection a pre-pubescent child might bring up," she said as he ate. "When I was in third grade, we had our first sex education class. My friend Stewart was of the opinion that this was the most incredibly disgusting thing he'd ever heard of, for more or less the same reason you just gave. After his hormones activated, Stewart spent most of his waking hours--" --and probably most of his sleeping ones as well, T'Laren thought-- "plotting how to commit the same act that had repulsed him six years ago."

"So you're saying I'm an eight-year-old child."

"Not at all. I'm saying that if a reason sufficient only for an eight-year-old child is sufficient for you, there's something seriously wrong with you. You are an adult human male, and while your health is poor now, you were in perfect condition three years ago. Your physical drives should be enough to overcome a repulsion of that nature; if not, it would imply that your body is somehow defective. I find it hard to imagine that the Q Continuum would have given you a defective body, especially one deficient in such an important aspect of human existence, given that they seemed to want you to become as human as possible. Is there some factor I'm not aware of?"

"It's..." Q reddened, and looked down off the edge of the table at his boots. "...not a defective body."

T'Laren had rather suspected not. "So you are capable of physical desire."

"My body is, yes." He looked up. "But that's irrelevant," he said sharply. "What my body may want has no bearing on what _I_ want. And _I_ consider sex repulsive."

"That may be true. But your body is exquisitely evolved to override any sort of mental opposition to sex, especially one as fundamentally baseless as disgust. I strongly suspect you must have better reasons for your inhibitions than simply thinking sex is dirty."

"I am really not comfortable discussing this," Q said. He pushed his plate away. "Why are you so interested, anyway? Do I detect a bit of prurient curiosity in your obsession with my sex life?"

"When uncomfortable, attack?" T'Laren sat down. "I know you're not comfortable with this, Q. You weren't very comfortable talking about most of the things we've discussed."

"This is different."

"Why is it different?"

"Why do you care?" he snapped. "I really have to wonder about this, T'Laren. You have this obsession with physical fitness-- which, coincidentally, usually seems to require you to wear significantly fewer clothes than usual. You've persuaded me to allow you to touch me. Now you insist that I _must_ have sexual desires. This is a very disturbing pattern."

T'Laren wondered if she should respond to the allegation-- it was typical behavior for him to make something up to get outraged over, but he sounded genuinely upset. "If you thought about it, I think you'd realize how paranoid you sound."

"That's right, T'Laren. Belittle me, make me sound like a fool, but by no means respond. If you answered the question, you might have to lie, and we all know how much you hate to lie."

That settled it. "If you're seriously worried, and not simply trying to escape an uncomfortable topic by attacking me, I will answer the question. Why does this disturb you? Are you afraid I might molest you? Or use my position to take advantage of you? Or do you simply fear that my motives aren't pure?"

"Any of it."

"Well, we can take care of the first two possibilities easily enough. In the first place, I am your therapist, and a highly ethical one at that." _When I'm not seducing Romulans, or betraying my husband, or worse._ The thought came unbidden, unwanted- she forced it away before it could show on her face and undermine her argument. "It would be morally wrong for me to abuse your trust in such fashion. And as a Vulcan, I am very good at resisting temptation. If-- for the sake of argument-- I found myself tempted to do such a thing, I could easily refrain from doing so."

"Your control's not that good."

"My control is iron, for a human. If I were as controlled as a normal Vulcan, I would be incapable of feeling tempted. Being what I am, I admit that under certain circumstances I have found myself attracted to men I should not become involved with, but I am Vulcan enough to resist temptation." _Sometimes._ "And to answer your third point, and make the previous question moot-- Q, why exactly do you think I might be attracted to you? You yourself have pointed out that your personality is not particularly lovable. Your health is poor, your appearance is not the best-- and you would make a very unpleasant meld partner. My sexuality is inextricably tied to my telepathy-- I am better off with my own imagination than with a man I can't meld with." _It would have been nice if I'd felt that way four years ago, wouldn't it. I might not need to be here now._

Q blinked. "That's... rather blunt."

"Would you prefer I spared your feelings and left you fearful of my motives?"

"Not as a general rule."

"Then we're back to the original question. Do you have any other reasons for your fear of sex?"

"I wouldn't call it _fear_, T'Laren."

"We already determined that it cannot solely be disgust--"

"Can't it?" he snapped. "You tell me sex is a basic human drive. I agree. It's also responsible for more idiocy, and more humiliations, than probably any other basic human drive. And it's not a biological requirement for the individual-- merely the species. I'm a hostage to this body, T'Laren. I have to feed it when it's hungry, rest it when it's tired, alter _my_ behavior because it doesn't feel well-- and I'm not strong enough to resist it. I don't want to die-- not most of the time, anyway-- so I can't afford to put my foot down about any of its demands that it actually requires. It does not, however, need sex. I can in perfect safety hold out on that one."

"Why do you want to hold out?"

"Because I'm sick of being a hostage! I _hate_ having a mortal body-- its constant demands, the way it can affect my mind when it's improperly cared for or just being ornery. I can refuse to give it sexual gratification. And it makes me feel... like I still have some modicum of control over my own life that I can resist my body's demands, even over a small thing like that."

"Yes, but why sex? Why not resist your body's desire to eat chocolate, and have vegetables instead? Why not resist your body's reluctance to exercise?"

"I do. Every day."

"You never did before I convinced you to. It must have been obvious to you that your body would last longer with regular exercise, and you were told several times that it would make you feel better in the long run. But you didn't try to resist your body's reluctance on that one. Why sex?"

"Maybe I just don't have a very high libido."

"Any libido at all would make it a strange choice. Your life is very unpleasant-- at least, so you've told me at length. Why have you gone to such lengths to resist a source of potential pleasure?"

"What are you saying, T'Laren, that I should run out and sleep with a total stranger at the first opportunity?"

"No. Of course not." She marshaled her argument carefully. "At this stage in your social development, it's entirely appropriate that you don't have sex. You have no friends, and few skills at making connections with people. Sexuality is only a small part of sociality, and you've mastered very little of that thus far. But you are at least willing to admit that you should work toward making social connections with others. You are trying to improve that aspect of your life. What concerns me about your sexuality is that you deny it. You won't try to change something about yourself unless you're desperate, and if you refuse to admit that sex is something you need, you will never admit that you're desperate. You'll channel the need into something else. Q, you were there for the Inquisition, the Puritan witch-hunts, the Victorian age-- you _know_, probably better than I do, what happens when humans repress their sexuality."

"You're talking about entire societies of humans, whose cultures repressed them. My culture isn't repressing me-- I don't _have_ a culture. I choose to repress myself."

"Yes, but I still don't understand why. If it were a mere exercise in control--"

"A _mere_ exercise in control?" He stood up, shoving his chair backward. "T'Laren, how can you possibly be so dense?" He faced her. "You said it yourself. I'm unattractive both socially and physically. If by some miracle someone _did_ want me, what could I possibly give them? I'm terrible at cooperative social endeavors, and sex certainly qualifies. I'm selfish, and socially inept, and not terribly dextrous. And do you know what humans _do_ to those who accept sexual gratification without being able to reciprocate? I would be a laughingstock. In exchange for a few fleeting moments of purely physical enjoyment, I would make myself unnecessarily vulnerable-- physically as well as emotionally; it would be just my luck that the first person who actually wanted me would turn out to be an assassin-- and then, assuming that my partner was _not_ an assassin, they would probably talk about me behind my back in less than glowing terms about what an inept lover I turned out to be. I need this?" He shook his head. "No, I can't imagine _anything_ being pleasurable enough to be worth that." He paced around the table. "The drives may be hardwired in, but they're sadly misplaced here. I couldn't participate in perpetuating this miserable little species even if I were mad enough to want to. And I'm not fond of being at the mercy of a completely useless biological drive, when the consequences of giving in to it involve so much potential for humiliation and misery."

T'Laren frowned slightly. "What did you mean about perpetuating the species?"

"I mean I'm sterile. Completely. Which, all things considered, is just as well."

"Your choice?"

Q shook his head. "I didn't think about it one way or another. I didn't design the body that way, if that's what you're asking. I found out at my first detailed physical, so I assume the Continuum was responsible-- especially since the method they chose is pretty abnormal. My cells simply do not undergo meiosis, for reasons that baffle Federation medical technology. I can't produce sperm cells. And, as I've said, it's probably just as well."

"You sound as if you're trying to convince yourself of that."

"Convince myself that I don't want to have to worry about making sure I have contraceptive shots on a regular basis, even though I have no intention of needing them, just on the off chance that I might--? I hardly need to convince myself of that."

"I would think... progeny are the mortal route to immortality, after all. I thought it might have occurred to you that that might be the only kind of immortality you could have now."

Q snorted. "That's not immortality. Mortals convince themselves that it is because otherwise they have to face the fact that they are completely ephemeral, and few mortals can face that. If the so-called 'immortality' of reproduction comes from creating something that will outlast you... I've created entire species, T'Laren. I hardly need to create one measly human. And if it comes from genetics, creating something that is fundamentally like you... my genetics have nothing whatsoever to do with who I am. If I were capable of fathering a human child, and foolish enough to do so, it wouldn't be _mine_\-- it would be the child of the man whose body I copied. Besides, I can't stand the young of my own species-- I certainly can't tolerate children of this one. And, leaving aside the fact that I would be a horrible father anyway, what kind of legacy would it be to give a child of _any_ species, to have for a parent someone that practically everyone in the galaxy wants dead?"

"You still sound as if you're trying to convince yourself."

"I'm _not_\--" He put a hand to his head. "I am. All right. Not about the children-- I don't want children, the whole idea's ridiculous-- but they didn't _tell_ me. They made this decision about my life, they altered the body I chose for myself, without even warning me they were going to do it, let alone consulting me. And that's stupid of me. I would have made the same decision myself-- and they _knew_ that. They're omniscient. Why bother to ask me when they already know my answer? Simpler just to do it. I _know_ that."

"But you still resent them for making the decision for you."

"It's stupid of me. I know that."

"Human emotions are under no constraints to be logical. Q, you have every right to resent your fellows. Whether or not the punishment was justified, they did exile you to a harsh and painful existence. You wouldn't be a normal human if you didn't resent them. And on top of that, they alter the body you chose for yourself, making major decisions about your life for you. It would have been common courtesy to consult with you. It wasn't necessary, but it wouldn't have been an effort for them, either, would it have?"

"No," he said quietly. "It wouldn't have."

"As for your earlier statements... do you truly believe that there's no potential for anything but humiliation in sexuality?"

Q sat down, folding his hands on the table and staring at them. "I've... occasionally tried to figure that out. Cost/benefit analysis and all that." He looked up, half-smiling. "The answer ends up being very annoying."

"What is the answer?"

"If I were to... indulge such base physical desires, it would... have to be with someone I could trust completely. Presumably, then, someone who actually cares about me to some extent, who wouldn't want to humiliate me and would be willing to... overlook, or accept, my probable ineptitude. It would... it would have to be for something more... what's the word, powerful? Meaningful, that's it. Something more meaningful than the mere gratification of lust."

"And why does that annoy you?"

"Because it makes me sound like a romantic." Q rolled his eyes. "'It would have to be an act of _love_,'" he crooned in an overblown parody of romanticism. "Please. Don't make me gag."

"I think everyone who knows you is well aware that you're not a romantic, Q," T'Laren said dryly. "Given that you wish to avoid humiliation-- and potential assassins-- your preference is actually quite understandable in practical terms."

"Well, that's good to hear."

"But this still doesn't seem to completely explain your behavior." T'Laren leaned forward slightly. "You've explained why you find it practical to make yourself find sex disgusting. When I first offered to rub your back, though, and you thought I might be trying to seduce you, you seemed positively terrified of the possibility."

"I wasn't _terrified_, T'Laren."

"You seemed to be. Or at least, far more nervous and uncomfortable than a person who merely has no interest in sex would be. If sex only disgusted you, I would have thought you would have accepted a backrub, and then if you felt it was somehow becoming sexual, informing me that you had no interest-- probably in your typical inimitable fashion." He smiled at that. "But you seemed very close to panic. I remember at the time I wondered if perhaps you had been molested somehow, as it seemed--" She broke off as she saw his expression change. "Q? _Did_ someone molest you?"

"It wasn't anything," he said, sharply and far too quickly.

"What happened?" She leaned further forward, placing a hand on the table, near him. "Q, please tell me what happened?"

"I just told you nothing happened!" he snapped, but his face was flushed. "And I don't want to talk about it."

T'Laren pulled back slightly. "You don't want to talk about the fact that nothing happened?" she asked with just a tiny twinge of dryness.

"I'm tired of telling you about everything. Can't I keep a few things to myself?"

"You certainly can if you really want to. But if you've been sexually molested somehow-- don't you see how that would have to change my approach? You gave me a good, rational reason for avoiding sex, but if that's not your real reason-- if your real reason is that you were abused-- then we still have to work on the problem."

"I wasn't abused!" Q snapped. "Not exactly. And I don't want to talk about it."

"Are you sure?"

"Look, T'Laren, it's not that important. You seem to have some kind of overblown sordid story in your head. It wasn't what you're probably thinking."

"Then what was it?"

"I don't want to talk about it! It's embarrassing."

Sometimes T'Laren wondered if Q ever meant it when he said he didn't want to discuss something. He seemed to spend a lot of time dropping vague hints and then trying to refuse to talk about what they meant. "Of course it's embarrassing," T'Laren said gently. "But you were willing to tell me about other incidents that embarrassed you, weren't you?"

"Humans think this one's funny. You might as well be a human for all intents and purposes. You'll laugh."

"I assure you, I won't laugh."

"Oh, of _course_ you won't _show_ it, T'Laren. You'll keep your Vulcan mask in place. You might even pretend concern. Inside your Vulcan skull, though, you'll be having hysterics. I _know_ it."

"Q, I don't see how I could consider someone being sexually molested to be funny--"

"Because it isn't what you think! And I want to know the answer to that one, too. Somehow humans-- well, Ohmura, anyway-- thought this was a laugh riot. I don't see how." He sounded hurt and angry.

"Perhaps I might understand why. If you told me what happened, I could explain why humans would find it funny."

"And what if you think it's funny, too?"

"I won't think it's funny. I don't think things that cause people pain or distress are funny. And if you truly didn't want to tell me, Q, why would you have tried to evade the topic so ineptly? You're better at misdirection than that."

His face twisted into a bitterly wry half-smile. "Touché," he murmured.

Q's hand closed around his drink glass. He twisted it, swirling the drink inside around, and stared down into it. "I've told you everything else, more or less. I suppose I should tell you this one, too. If for no other reason than that I suspect you've got a completely wrong notion of what happened." He looked up at her. "This was in the early days. I'd been on the station two, three months. We hadn't really gotten going on the work against the Borg yet, and I hadn't yet worked out who everyone was and what their positions were. I knew ranks, because they were obvious, but I was vague on names and functions.

"I'd managed to throw out my back yet again-- I suspect it was actually less dysfunctional than my back generally is today, but I was also much less used to pain in those days, so it felt quite horrible. I could still walk, so I was on my way to Sickbay to get it fixed-- not an event I was looking forward to; Li had no conception of how to be gentle with things like that. And on my way, I ran into a young woman, a lieutenant in blues. I dimly recalled having seen her around the sickbay labs, so I assumed she was medical.

"She asked me what was wrong, and I told her. So she offered to fix my back for me. As I recalled her having been one of the few people on the base who treated me with anything resembling kindness, I saw no reason not to let her, as she assured me what she had in mind would be... considerably less unpleasant than Li's torture devices." Q glanced down in apparent embarrassment on the last part. As if he were ashamed of his own embarrassment, he quickly looked up again. "You have to understand, I was much more naive then. I was spending so much time in just trying to adjust to what had happened to me, I didn't notice a lot of the more subtle nuances of human interaction. It didn't enter my mind that it might be a bad idea to go back to my room with her."

T'Laren had a sneaking suspicion she knew where this was going. "I understand."

"I should have realized, you know." He looked pensive. "Of course, I had nothing to compare it to. But when she started on my back... it was completely different from the way you did it. It was a lot more... um, a lot less... what's the word I'm looking for? Less... not impersonal..."

"Clinical?"

"Yes, exactly. Much less clinical. More... um. In any case, I had nothing to compare it to, as I said, so I didn't realize this wasn't entirely aimed at fixing my back until... well, eventually it became quite obvious. I may have been naive, but never _that_ naive."

T'Laren could just imagine. "Was the woman Lieutenant Amy Frasier, by any chance?"

Q looked stricken. "Did she _tell_ you--?"

"No-- but when I interviewed you she seemed to be unusually vitriolic about you. Then Lieutenant Roth explained why, in his belief, Frasier particularly hated you--"

"_He_ told you? He _knows_ what happened?" Q was quite agitated. "Good God-- if Roth knew, it must have gotten all over the station--"

"Roth didn't know what happened, exactly. He deduced that you probably rejected Frasier sexually, from the fact that her interest in you seemed to turn very quickly into hatred, but he knew none of the details."

"Oh." Q calmed down. "That's different."

"What did you do, when she made it obvious that she was trying to seduce you?" _And how did she make it obvious, exactly?_ T'Laren had to admit to an overwhelming curiosity about the extent of Q's self-proclaimed naivete. How much, exactly, had it taken for him to catch on? He was badly embarrassed enough by talking about this at all, though; T'Laren was sure that if she asked him, not only wouldn't she get an answer but he'd balk at telling the rest of the story.

"Well, I-- I confess, I was mostly very confused. I wasn't sure why she was doing this. Why me? I knew even then that my personality was... not exactly the most endearing. So... I asked her that. Why me?" He began playing with his napkin, watching his own fidgeting hands instead of looking at T'Laren. "I think... had I gotten a different answer... I might have gone along with her at that point. I would have... I'd even have accepted mere physical attraction. After all, I _was_ good-looking then. And I'm capable of vanity. Actually, I think I have more right to be vain about my appearance than most humans. I chose this form, after all. If someone likes the way I look, that's a positive reflection on my taste as well as my appearance. In fact, I'm almost sure I would have accepted that. At... that particular point... there probably weren't that many reasons... I wouldn't have accepted."

"I take it she picked one."

"She said-- well, she made it clear that she was interested in me solely because she'd never had a several-million-year-old former god before. And that was quite unacceptable. Quite aside from the fact that I find it insulting and offensive to be, to be merely a _novelty_ item-- part of her collection of unusual aliens she's bedded-- that wasn't the worst. I could just picture her telling her co-workers, 'And you'll never guess what I did over the weekend. I did a former god!' 'Really? Was he any good?' 'No, actually he was terrible. One of the worst I've had.' It didn't strike me that Amy Frasier would be the type to... forgive any clumsiness on my part. I could just imagine what she'd say about me afterward. Probably to the entire starbase. So I said no."

"Abrasively, I take it."

"Um... no. I couldn't seem to... I didn't have a lot of breath for talking, if you really must know. But I did say no. And she wouldn't take no for an answer. She kept right on with what she was doing."

And then he tore her apart, most likely. "What did you do then?"

"I called Security."

T'Laren blinked, the closest she would allow herself to letting her jaw drop. No, she _hadn't_ known where this was going, apparently. "You... didn't."

"I _did_," Q said indignantly. "I said no, after all. And she wouldn't stop. So I called Security and told them I wanted to press charges of attempted rape."

A call for Security couldn't be countermanded. And Security was never very far from Q's quarters... T'Laren had a sudden mental image of the hapless lieutenant trying desperately to clothe herself before Security showed, probably failing, Q's righteous indignation, probably in a state of undress himself... oh, she could see why Ohmura would have thought it was funny. She herself thought it more tragic than anything else. How could _anyone_ have so little common sense? No wonder Frasier hated him. Had anyone done that to T'Laren, he would have found out the truth behind the rumors of the Vulcan death grip. "What... was Security's reaction?"

"I told you, Ohmura thought it was funny. T'Meth probably didn't, but she was looking at me like this was the most trivial complaint she'd ever heard, and I was a worm for wasting her time. I don't know why! I told Frasier to stop, she wouldn't stop. If our sexes had been reversed, there wouldn't have been any question that it was attempted rape. No one would have thought it was funny."

"Q..." How to put this. "Were you... physically aroused at that point?" _And did you make any attempt to hide it from Security?_

"I don't see what that has to do with anything. I said no."

"Were you?"

"What my body may or may not want is irrelevant. _I_ didn't want this!"

"Most men do not draw such a sharp distinction between themselves and their bodies."

"I'm not most men."

__

_I know_

_. "Ohmura wouldn't take the charges, then?"_

"He told me-- after he stopped trying to keep from laughing-- I had no idea he thought an attempted rape was so hysterically amusing-- he told me that the charges wouldn't stick, that there was no chance the case would even go to court, and that if I pressed charges I would be the laughingstock of the base. He assured me that neither he nor T'Meth would mention the incident to anyone else if I would drop the charges. And... I couldn't understand why they were being so unjust, but I do know that humans are capable of gross acts of injustice. After seeing his reaction, I believed him that I'd get no human court to treat me fairly. That everyone would find it horrendously entertaining. So... I agreed."

"Probably the most sensible thing you did that evening."

"You're laughing at me!"

"I assure you, I'm not laughing," T'Laren said, deadly serious. "Q, that was _not_ an attempted rape."

"No? What would you call it?"

"A seduction that went seriously wrong." T'Laren found herself feeling sorry for Lieutenant Frasier. Her motives may have been shallow, but she'd hardly deserved this.

"T'Laren, I told her to stop. She refused."

"Did she even _hear_ you?"

"Of course she heard me! She said something to the effect of, 'you don't really want me to stop.' You know, 'your lips say no, no, no, but your heart says yes, yes, yes' kind of thing. I felt like I was in a bad gothic romance."

"Q, Amy Frasier is half your size! If you felt threatened by her, why didn't you push her away?"

"I panicked, all right?"

She could see that. After all, Q had a history of screaming for help rather than defending himself physically. He could conceivably have been too panicked to realize he could just remove the problem from his person. "Anyway," he added, "I couldn't seem to... to make myself move."

"I thought you didn't freeze when you panic."

"I don't. It wasn't... I wasn't frozen." He stared at the floor in a misery of embarrassment. Abruptly T'Laren understood. She tried to find a tactful way to phrase her understanding.

"You felt yourself at war with your own body? You found it physically pleasurable, but feared the consequences too much to let it go on?"

"Yes. Exactly."

"And so you said no. And she ignored you."

"Yes! It was _my_ understanding that that constitutes rape, or at least attempted rape. What was so incredibly humorous about the situation?"

How to phrase this. "You're not a disembodied mind, Q. When you told Frasier no, your body language may have betrayed you. You may have said it in a fashion that implied that you didn't really mean it."

"What's that supposed to mean? No means no."

"Not always. Humans are more complex than that." She sighed. "Several things were working against you. For one thing, you're male. Since males can't hide physical arousal, and in most cases physical arousal implies desire, it's difficult for some humans to take a man's refusal seriously. There would have to be some reason why he would not want to fulfill his body's obvious desires."

"Perhaps most human men take their orders from an insignificant piece of flesh between their legs. I, however, would prefer to make decisions with something more capable of high-order logic."

"As you said, you're not most men. Plus, the dichotomy between body and mind isn't as simple as you think, Q. What confuses you is the fact that you didn't used to have a body. Now that you have one, though, you are your body. You're not a ball of energy trapped inside a fleshy shell. You _are_ your body. What it wants, you cannot help but want. The conflict was not between your body and your mind, but between the desire for pleasure and the desire to avoid humiliation. In you, in this circumstance, the desire to avoid humiliation was stronger. In most men, it goes the other way around. And Lieutenant Frasier's experience was with other men, not you. She didn't know you. Also, you were physically stronger than her. With her Starfleet training, she could conceivably have overpowered you-- but she wasn't trying to. She would have assumed that if you really didn't want her there, you would push her away, or move away from her."

"But I said no."

"No doesn't always mean 'no, stop this right now and go away.' It can mean 'no, I need a bit more persuasion before I'll go through with this.' Obviously Frasier interpreted it as the second. I suspect her comment about you not really meaning it was intended as something of a flirtatious joke. If you _had_ really meant it, in her mind, you would have repeated yourself more firmly, with some move to physically distance yourself from her. Rape involves coercion. What Frasier was trying was seduction, not coercion."

"I consider attempts to make my body overpower my personal judgment a form of coercion. How is attempting to control my behavior with pleasure different from trying to control my behavior with pain?"

"That's like saying that a person who offers you something pleasant to eat is trying to coerce you into eating. A drug such as iolera, that completely overwhelms your judgment-- yes, that's coercion. But offering a person pleasure in order to get them to do what you want is considered seduction by definition. Most people-- you included-- have stronger defenses against pleasure than against pain. The idea behind seduction is to make the other person want to do what you want them to do, whereas coercion by pain is intended to make them fear the consequences of noncompliance. It's a completely different act." His face was closed and hostile; if she was going to get through to him at all, she would have to show some sympathy. "Mind you, you could have pressed charges against Frasier; Ohmura wasn't telling you the whole truth. You couldn't have made charges of rape hold up in court, but you could have charged her with violating the Starfleet guidelines on relations with aliens."

"Starfleet has _guidelines_ on that?"

"Starfleet has guidelines on all forms of contact with non-humans, including sexual. The guidelines state that one should never assume that a person not of one's own culture-- especially aliens, but including members of one's own species if they are of a different culture-- shares one's own sexual mores and customs. While sexual relations with aliens aren't forbidden-- Starfleet would have a near-impossible time enforcing _that_\-- people engaged in sexual relations with aliens are supposed to proceed with caution, and to make their intentions unmistakably clear. Frasier was obviously in violation of the guidelines, and you could have charged her with causing you emotional harm through such violation."

His eyes narrowed. "And would that have worked?"

T'Laren shook her head. "Difficult to say. I can tell you that you would have found the trial humiliating, however. You would be forced to explain in court, in detail, exactly what she did to you and why it disturbed you. And Ohmura was right-- you would have become a laughingstock."

"_Why?_" he snapped. "This sexual double standard humans hold to--"

"Not because you're male. If the same thing had happened, and you'd been female, with the same personality you have now, you'd still have been laughed at. You're arrogant, Q. We both know this. And you behave as if you know more than everyone else. You are, in reality, naive about many aspects of human culture-- but you're also incredibly knowledgeable, and you also pretend to be more knowledgeable than you actually are. The humor would be in the fact that an arrogant know-it-all would turn out to be so tremendously ignorant about such an important aspect of human existence. Humans consider other people's embarrassing sexual misadventures to be funny anyway-- Ohmura was probably laughing at Frasier as much as he was laughing at you. But if you had friends, if you didn't behave as if you thought yourself superior to everyone else, there would be sympathy in their amusement, as there was for Frasier. You, however-- as long as you behave the way you do, humans will find your humiliations to be funny."

"Do you think it was funny?"

"I told you, I don't find things like that funny. I feel sorry for Frasier; she should have been more sensitive, she should have followed the guidelines, she would have completely deserved for you to tear her apart verbally... but she didn't deserve _that_ much humiliation. I also feel sorry for you. You could not entirely help your own ignorance." She shook her head slightly. "So that's why you were afraid when I first offered you a backrub?"

He didn't answer, staring at the floor. "Q?"

He looked up. "It's true, isn't it. They've been laughing all along."

T'Laren could not quite follow the leap. "Who have?"

"Everyone." Q lifted his empty coffee cup and twirled it around his finger by the handle. "My humiliations have been a source of vast amusement, haven't they. Anderson, Medellin, Li... or we can go back even further, to Picard, Riker, Crusher and LaForge... all immensely amused by me. Watch a being known for godlike omniscience stumble around in ignorance and terror, making a complete idiot of himself!" Abruptly he flung the coffee cup at the floor. It bounced across the floor with a clatter, unharmed. "I would have _died_ for this miserable species! I risked my own existence, the displeasure of my people, to save them from the Borg-- how _dare_ they be amused by my pain!"

"Q, you're overreacting. No one thinks it's funny that beings are trying to kill you, or that you're miserably unhappy. No one thought your suicide attempts were funny. If you had, through ignorance, actually ended up getting raped, no one would have thought that funny. What amuses humans about your situation is your fear of things that seem perfectly natural and pleasant, or at least not unpleasant, to them. You behave as if you're still all-knowing, and so when you're ignorant of something that seems obvious to humans, that's what seems funny. Not the fact that you're suffering."

"How do you know? You're not human. You can pretend, you can mimic humans reasonably well, but can you really get inside their heads? Can you know for certain what humans think and feel?"

"As certainly as anyone can know what any other being thinks and feels. I've mindmelded with humans, I was raised by them, and with them. There are undoubtedly humans who would find your suffering humorous, or worse. Those are sick people. Most of the humans you will encounter will not be amused."

He continued to stare at the floor. She could see an unfocused rage roiling within him, and knew he was going to find some excuse to hang it on, something irrational he could explode against. It looked very much as if they were about to get into a pointless argument. _Well, Counselor, counsel. You're the psychologist-- defuse the situation._ "I'm sorry if I upset you," she said gently. "Can you tell me why you're so angry?"

Q looked up and glared at her. "You sympathized with _her_. You'd have taken her side if you'd been there. You as much as admitted that she was wrong, she was violating Starfleet guidelines, she had no business behaving that way toward me, and you _still_ feel sorry for her!"

"You brought your own mortality down on yourself, and I can still feel sorry for you," T'Laren said. "Just because a person has some complicity in an unpleasant event that happens to them doesn't make sympathy for them an invalid response. You're quite right, Q. She was wrong. But she didn't intend to hurt you, and you didn't really make your own position clear enough before bringing out the heavy guns. If you are going to accuse someone of attempted rape, you should at least make sure that you made your unwillingness adequately clear to them. I don't think you did."

"Fine. The next time someone tries that, I'll punch her in the face. Would that be better?"

"Ordering her to leave your room immediately would work a bit better, I think. As would sitting or standing up and pushing her away. And then there's the entire universe of tactful rejections, which I suspect I or someone will have to teach you at some point. If all else fails, lie and say you can't because your people have forbidden it. Or, if the person doesn't know your circumstances, claim religious reasons. Anyone in Starfleet would back off at that point."

"It doesn't matter," Q muttered. "It's not going to happen again anyway."

"Do you mean that it won't happen because you're less naive, and won't let matters progress that far? Or do you mean it won't happen because no one will make the offer again?"

"Either."

"I wouldn't count on the second one if I were you. When your health improves, people will start finding you at least physically attractive again-- and since one of our purposes here is to make you more socially attractive, even people who know you reasonably well might consider you worth pursuing. I think you're reasonably correct on the first, though-- but I still think having a few tactful rejections in your repertoire couldn't hurt."

"Whatever you say." He stood up abruptly. "When are we reaching the conference?"

"In five days."

"I'm bored. Let's speed things up."

"Do you think you're well enough?"

"I'm not going to get any better by being bored out of my skull, now am I?"

"You'll get better by eating right and exercising."

"Which I've been doing. I can handle the conference, T'Laren. And we can safely speed up to warp 8 without straining the crystals."

T'Laren considered. She suspected strongly that Q was saying this because he was tired of her persuading him to talk about things he would have preferred to keep secret. It was possible that that technique was reaching the point of diminishing returns, though, and it was time to see him interacting with other people, see how far he had indeed come. "I'll notify the _Yamato_ of the change in plans."

"Fine. I'll be in my quarters."

* * *

He was not, however, in his quarters when she came to tell him of _Yamato_'s confirmation. She found him on Deck 4, doing something incomprehensible to the airlocks with a toolkit. "Q?"

Q looked up at her almost cheerfully. "And the verdict is?"

"We'll be rendezvousing with _Yamato_ in three days instead of five. What are you doing?"

"Fixing the airlock."

"I didn't know it was broken."

Q returned to what he was doing. "It wasn't, exactly. I'm really not fond of that damned security interlock."

A chill went down T'Laren's spine. "Were you planning on spacing any living beings?" she asked coolly.

"You never know," Q said absently.

She knelt next to him and put her hand on his shoulder, tugging him to face her gently. He turned. "What _is_ it, T'Laren? I'm busy."

"I can see that. I want to know why."

"Because. The idea that we can't use the airlocks to space something that might be trying to kill me bothers me just a little bit. Like many 'safety' features, I consider this one to be particularly unsafe. So I'm disabling it."

"If you disable the safety interlock, it would be far easier for you to space yourself, should you decide to kill yourself," T'Laren said softly.

Q put down his tools. "I know that. Why do you think I waited until now to do it?"

T'Laren nodded slowly. She thought she knew what he meant, but she wanted confirmation. "Can you explain that?"

"I've decided not to kill myself." He picked up the tools again. "I mean, I decided I wasn't going to kill myself right away when I came on this trip. But I thought about it-- I've been thinking about it, for the past few days-- and I've come to the conclusion that I don't _want_ to kill myself. That, except with a few bouts with nightmares, I haven't really wanted to since I came aboard _Ketaya._ I feel much better about my life-- I'm far from happy, but I think I can stick this out for a few more years." Q turned back to his work. "So I've decided that I'm off suicide watch, and I can afford to have something like a live airlock within reach again. I've felt insecure about not being able to use this airlock for some time."

"But you felt that you couldn't trust yourself? And now you can?"

"Now I can," he agreed.

She believed him. His very casualness about the decision made her certain he was sincere. Deliberately T'Laren allowed the smile she felt to show on her face. "I'm very glad."

Q glanced at her quickly, and turned back to his work with a small grin spreading across his face. "And I'm glad you're glad. Now can we adjourn the meeting of the mutual admiration society and let me get back to my work?"

"Don't tire yourself out. We still have to do your self-defense lessons."

"Yes, yes. Go away, T'Laren."

She turned away, toward the lift. "I'll see you at lunch."

* * *

Three days later they docked with _Yamato_.


	3. 3a: Yamato

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part 3 was too long for AO3, so I broke it into two parts, but I can't get the chaptering to set it as 3a and 3b, so all the chapters from here on out will be wrongly numbered.

_Starfleet officers live for challenge_, Commander Derek Wilde repeated silently to himself, like a mantra. _We love it. We thrive on it._

It wasn't working.

Captain Okita had smiled when he said it. "I think it would be good practice for you to have primary responsibility for the conference, Mr. Wilde," he'd said cheerfully. "Hone your diplomatic skills. Give you a wider range of command experience." What he meant was, "I don't want to be bothered babysitting these people, so I'm sticking you with it, Derek." Thank you _so_ much, kindly mentor Okita.

It was, he was sure, a recipe for sure disaster. Take 40 of the most brilliant-- and most temperamental-- minds in the Federation. Bring them together on a single Galaxy-class starship for a scientific conference regarding a singularity sitting squatly just out of range to suck _Yamato_ into itself. Oh, and add that the science officer for that Galaxy-class starship, Lieutenant Commander Shahrazad Dhawan, was herself one of the most brilliant and temperamental minds in the Federation, that she had very strong opinions on the nature of the singularity and resented the hell out of the decision to have a scientific conference. Further stipulate that because of the science officer's passionate and highly undiplomatic nature, most of the science department's liaison duties to the conference were being carried out by a naive young Vulcan, who would have been described as an airhead had she not been a phenomenal genius, since her innocence of other species' ways was as great as her intellect. All in all, Wilde was convinced that the conference was a disaster waiting to happen.

He was now attempting to convince himself that _Yamato_'s science officer was not totally insane. "You _pulled a knife_ on Dr. Morakh."

Dhawan nodded, completely unapologetic. "You ever been to a Klingon scientific conference, Commander? That's an accepted part of scientific debate."

"You are not a Klingon, Dhawan! You're a Starfleet officer!"

"Yes, but I was debating with a Klingon. You have to speak to people in a language they understand."

"So speak to him in Klingon. _Don't_ pull a _knife_ on him! My God, what if he'd attacked you and you'd killed him? Or he'd killed you?"

"I'm good enough not to get killed in a debate. And he'd never have achieved his current level of pre-eminence in the scientific world if he was careless enough to get killed by a human woman with a pocketknife."

"That _thing_ was hardly a pocketknife, mister."

Lieutenant Sovaz, watching the debate with interest, piped up. "Actually, it was a ceremonial dagger of the Cianni, used for combats in their mating and political rituals. Commander Dhawan received it from the Cianni when she defeated--"

"Enough, Sovaz," Dhawan snapped. The young Vulcan woman quieted instantly.

"Do you understand the diplomatic ramifications of this? A Starfleet officer attacked a Klingon scientist with a ceremonial dagger?"

"I didn't attack him," Dhawan protested. "I pulled it out and told him I'd cut off his balls if he insulted my methodology one more time. And you should have heard his insults, Commander. I would have lost face if I hadn't threatened him."

"I don't care about your lost face! This is a Starfleet vessel, one of the premier vessels of the fleet. We have an example--"

Dhawan smiled innocently. "We also have an obligation to honor other people's cultures, don't we?"

Wilde controlled the urge to punch her. "We are hosting a multi-species conference of highly touchy and incompatible people. We have a Klingon and his retinue. We have a Tellarite. We have two Andorians and a Nausicaan. We have a Cardassian-- on a ship where the Counselor we're relying on to help mediate is Bajoran. We have a large number of very volatile human personalities. Scheduled to come aboard still, we have a Romulan woman, a former energy being who specialized in harassing people for several million years, and a woman from god only knows what species with god only knows what problems. The only way we're going to keep control of this madhouse is to follow Starfleet diplomatic guidelines. And that means that _you_ are going to control your temper, is that understood, mister?"

"Understood, Commander," Dhawan said calmly. Meaning, most likely, "I'll say whatever you want and then do what I like, Commander."

Wilde felt he hadn't made his point, and opened his mouth to start again, when his communicator went off. "Wilde here."

"Sir, _Ketaya_ is docking. Q will be coming aboard in a few minutes."

"My favorite," Wilde muttered. "Acknowledged." He turned toward the door. "Mr. Sovaz, meet me in the main transporter room in ten minutes."

"Aye, sir."

* * *

Lieutenant Sovaz often found humans hopelessly confusing.

This was hardly a surprise. Sovaz often found Vulcans hopelessly confusing as well. She had long ago accepted that she simply didn't live in the same universe as most people, whatever their species, and yet she still persisted in the belief that on some level, others must be fundamentally like her. She was puzzled by Commander Dhawan's unwillingness to meet the scientists as they came aboard-- Sovaz herself couldn't wait until they were all aboard. "We're going to meet some of the greatest minds in the Federation," Sovaz had said three days ago. "I would think that a human would be excited by the opportunity."

Dhawan had grinned. "Does that mean that you're excited, Sovaz?"

It was not very Vulcan to admit to a human that one was excited. "I confess I'm looking forward to this with great anticipation," Sovaz said instead.

"Well, I'm glad someone is," Dhawan had said, and had never explained to Sovaz why she didn't feel the excitement Sovaz would expect a human to feel. Or why no one else on the ship seemed to feel such excitement, either.

Earlier today, when Sovaz had been told that Q was expected to arrive today, she _had_, in fact, felt excitement. She had performed a calming exercise, but had to admit that it had not been entirely successful. Everyone else who was coming aboard was brilliant, a scientific luminary, someone Sovaz looked up to and respected. But all of them had acquired their knowledge from more or less the same places Sovaz had acquired hers. Q had millions of years of experience in practical physics, and had once known literally everything there was to know about the physical universe. Even now, if her understanding of his situation was correct, he knew more or less everything it was possible for a human being to comprehend. Q could answer any question Sovaz had-- all she had to do was think of the right questions to ask. It was quite a thrilling notion, and not entirely illogical that she _should_ feel excitement at such a prospect. Curiosity was an accepted emotion, after all. If anyone had asked Sovaz if she were excited right now, she would have in all honesty had to answer "yes."

And yet...

She heard Tanai, the comm officer, say to Wilde, "_Ketaya_ is docking," and it blotted out the pleasure she'd expected to feel at the prospect of meeting Q. The word _ketaya_ was a reminder of a grief she had never entirely been able to overcome. Sovaz held her face as still as she could as she acknowledged Wilde's order. But she walked to the transporter room more slowly than usual, and fought for mastery of feelings she had never truly been able to deny.

To most Vulcans, a ketaya was a nuisance, flying in windows left open and stealing shiny objects, or digging through improperly covered refuse. On her _Kahs-wan_, Sovaz had seen a ketaya digging out the eyes of a dead sahar, a sleek predator of the mountains. They were much like Terran magpies or ravens, scavengers and tricksters, and unlike their Terran counterparts the ketayas were green, the exact shade of blood. None of this meant much to modern Vulcans. When Sovaz had been a child, though, the ketaya was a magic bird, harbinger of death and transformation in the ancient myths her older sister would tell her.

She remembered sitting on T'Laren's lap, transfixed by the visions a tale invoked in her. T'Laren would change her voice when she spoke different parts-- high and sweet for a ketaya, growling and gruff for a sehlat, cruel and bitter for a le'matya. Or she would tell stories of ancient gods, when creatures far beyond the ken of mortals walked the surface of Vulcan. Sovaz knew perfectly well that such stories were illogical-- sehlats did not really talk, and she was quite positive that even in the days before Surak gods did not walk around on Vulcan-- but she didn't care. The stories were fun, and if her older sister chose to tell them to her, who was she, a small child, to contradict her elders?

Sometimes there had been conflicts. She remembered once, when T'Laren had been telling her a story, her brother Soram entered the room and stared. Sovaz squirmed slightly, uncomfortable under her elder brother's gaze. She knew, though she was not sure how, that Soram disapproved.

"You should not fill the child's head with lies, T'Laren," he'd said. Actually, he'd said "my betrothed one," not "T'Laren", and after they actually got married he always called T'Laren "wife." Sovaz didn't know why. Mother and Father called each other by their proper names.

T'Laren had shaken her head. "Is that all you can see in the old stories, Soram? Lies?"

"They are obviously not true. Therefore they are lies. I don't see how that is a difficult conclusion to draw."

"Simply because they're not true doesn't make them lies. That's a very black and white argument." T'Laren had gently removed Sovaz from her lap. "Embedded in a fictional story can be powerful truths, that would sound insipid if simply stated flatly. Some truths require the resonance of symbolism. And children are well-equipped to interpret symbolism, better than they are to interpret plain facts."

"You speak of human children, betrothed. Not Vulcans."

"There is little difference at Sovaz's age."

"And you, of course, are an expert on the raising of Vulcan children."

T'Laren had raised her eyebrow. "You are not my father, betrothed. Nor are you hers. If you have a difficulty with my treatment of your little sister, take it up with your father. Should he choose to ask that I stop, I will obey." She had turned back to Sovaz as Soram left, stiff-shouldered. "Now where were we?"

Not all her stories were of Vulcan's past. Sometimes she told stories of Earth, which seemed as distant and impossible a place as the once-upon-a-time land where Vulcan's ancient myths took place. Sovaz had protested and called her a liar when T'Laren told her that water fell out of the sky on Earth, and that every ten or fifteen years it did the same thing on Vulcan. T'Laren had shown her holotapes to prove it. And sometimes, T'Laren had said, it grew very cold on Earth, and the water that fell from the sky froze to ice before it hit the ground. But it formed very tiny, powdery, white ice crystals that covered the ground like sand, and that human children would play in, bundled in warm clothing. Sovaz found this as likely as the notion of talking ketayas, but T'Laren assured her that it was true. And if that could be true, then _anything_ could be. The universe was full of wonders. As Sovaz had grown older and T'Laren had advanced in Starfleet, T'Laren would come home on leave with more wondrous stories of places she had visited. Sovaz determined to follow her parents' and brother's footsteps into Starfleet, not for their sake, but for the stories T'Laren told her.

Two years ago, T'Laren had stolen a shuttle and thrown herself out into the skies over Vulcan, ending her stories forever.

Grief was appropriate, was proper, at a loss of such magnitude. But it was the Vulcan way to grieve and then to master the grief, to remember the life without pain. And Sovaz could not. After two years, she still grieved. There was a question left unanswered, and Sovaz, who would not acknowledge that any mystery must remain forever unsolved, was forced to face the fact that she would never learn why her older sister died. If it had been an accident, she could research the cause and comprehend it, someday; if it had been murder, she could have questioned the killer. But T'Laren's murderer was forever beyond questioning.

It made no _sense_. Why would anyone kill themselves? It went against the most fundamental drives of any sentient race! It was illogical in the extreme, and the explanations Sovaz had been given were no explanations at all. Words like "unwell" were used to describe T'Laren, before her death-- as if Sovaz, an ensign in Starfleet at the time, was too much of a child to understand the truth. After her death, occasionally the word "insane" was used. But that explained nothing. Had T'Laren been too mad to know what she was doing? Had she believed she could breathe in space, that she would fly among the stars without a ship? Or had she known what she was doing? And if she had, _how_ could she have done it? _How could she have abandoned those who cared for her?_

Sovaz had questioned Soram, sure that T'Laren's bondmate had to have known what was going through her mind-- but Soram told her that he had kept his mind closed to T'Laren since her insanity first manifested. The final communication he had with her, her deathcry, was the first he'd had in months. And when Sovaz asked if he had sensed anything in that final cry as to her emotions-- did she feel triumph? release? despair? joy?-- he looked at her as if she had committed an obscenity and said that he would not speak of it.

Today she was to meet a person who knew the answers to all the questions Sovaz might have, except for that one-- _why did T'Laren kill herself? _And she would give up the answers to all the other questions, she would give up this opportunity she'd been given, if only she could learn the answer to that one...

But that was foolishness. Sovaz forced composure. She should concentrate on the opportunities she did have. And concentrate on doing her job, and making Q feel welcome here.

She entered the transporter room. Counselor Tris and Security Chief Washington were already there, Washington in a dress uniform and Tris in what Sovaz presumed was a Bajoran dress uniform. When Tris wore a uniform at all, it was a Bajoran military uniform; he wasn't Starfleet, exactly. Sovaz made sure she was composed, and took a deep breath.

Commander Wilde came in. "Q's party is ready to beam up, sir," the transporter chief told him.

"Right. Energize."

For a moment, as the shimmering forms took solidity on the transporter platform, Sovaz saw the man she had come to greet, a tall slender human. Then her attention was entirely caught by his companion. She stared at the Vulcan woman materializing, unable to believe her eyes. Could it possibly be true? Somehow, some way, could Soram have been wrong?

Then the two had fully materialized, and Sovaz was sure. Emotions surged in her, beyond all hope of control. "T'Laren!" she cried, and lunged forward, breaking ranks. "_Sister! _You're _alive!_"

T'Laren stepped back slightly and studied her with the same utter coldness Soram had given her when she had been overemotional. "Lieutenant Sovaz," she said in a coolly correct voice, obviously reading Sovaz's rank from her pips. "I was unaware that you had been posted to _Yamato._"

Sovaz stepped backward in bewilderment and growing mortification. Why was T'Laren being so cold? So... traditionalist? Was she ashamed of Sovaz for the emotions Sovaz had shown? She must be, yet why? It wasn't like T'Laren to reprove Sovaz for emotions-- maybe she was wrong and it wasn't really T'Laren? But no, it had to be-- how would she have known Sovaz's name?

Commander Wilde stepped forward, hastily filling the awkward moment with talk. "Welcome to the _Yamato. _I'm Commander Derek Wilde, first officer. I'm responsible for the conference."

Q watched the interchange between Sovaz and T'Laren with dawning interest. It seemed perhaps that this conference would be far more entertaining than he'd thought. He was slightly amused at Wilde's attempt to cover, and decided to make life difficult for the man. "So the captain doesn't think I'm worthy of his personal attention, is that it?"

"Not at all!" Wilde said stoutly. "Captain Okita will see you after you've had time to get settled in and comfortable. He believes people should be at ease before meeting with ship's captains. This is our security chief, Lieutenant Ken Washington--" a tall human with curly, chocolate-brown hair and big blue eyes, who looked far too young for his job and far too serious for his youth-- "Counselor Tris--" a male Bajoran in a non-Starfleet uniform with black hair and strangely feral dark eyes, who was glaring at T'Laren-- "and Lieutenant Sovaz, science liaison to the conference. And you must be Q, right?"

That was a space-filler question if Q ever heard one. He jerked his thumb at T'Laren. "No, she's Q. I'm A."

T'Laren said severely, in her I-Am-The-Ultimate-Vulcan voice, "I am Doctor T'Laren, Q's psychiatrist."

"Ah." Wilde nodded. "Pleased to meet you, Doctor." He turned back to Q. "Sovaz'll take you to your quarters, get you--"

"I would prefer another guide, Commander," T'Laren said in the same icy voice.

"Fine," the Bajoran snapped. "I'll do it." He grabbed T'Laren's arm and tugged her off the platform with a complete lack of diplomacy. Q smiled, intrigued. This was getting better and better.

In the corridor, Tris snapped, "What the _hell_ are you trying to pull, T'Laren?"

"I am not trying to 'pull' anything."

"_Don't_ give me that shit! I want an explanation-- if for nothing else, then what you did to Sovaz. That was just inexcusable."

"I have no desire to discuss it," T'Laren said, glancing back at Q.

"Fine. We'll talk later." Tris released T'Laren's arm and strode ahead.

"Hardly a very diplomatic young man, is he," Q murmured. "Though for a Bajoran, I suppose he's a radiant source of goodwill."

"Q. Be quiet."

"So what's this about your sister? I'm astonished, T'Laren. You told _me_ you had no siblings. Was this perhaps an oversight?"

"I have no sister."

"Sovaz seemed to believe otherwise."

"Sovaz is mistaken. She is not my sister."

"And that solves everything, doesn't it?" Tris muttered, loudly enough to be audible to Q.

He palmed open a door. "These are your quarters. There's two bedrooms, with individual locks, and a living room and bathroom accessible from both. Here--" he handed Q a round badge of some sort-- "is your guest combadge. If you need anything, don't hesitate to call."

"Can I have a Starfleet uniform?" Q asked. "Red."

Tris seemed to think about it. "Mmmm-- no," he said decisively.

"Why not?"

"Stop it," T'Laren said sharply.

"Because you're not Starfleet," Tris said, "and if I can't have a Starfleet uniform, neither can you. Sorry, but them's the breaks." He stepped into the quarters. "If you want to freshen up, the bathroom's over there."

Q wondered if he should take the hint, and decided not to. This was far too amusing. "I'll keep it in mind," he said cheerily.

"I believe I would like to," T'Laren said, starting for the bathroom.

"Oh no you don't," Tris said, grabbing hold of her arm. "You and I need to talk."

He tugged her out of the room. Q started to follow, and Tris pressed the manual override button to close the door, in Q's face.

Well. This was hardly diplomatic treatment. Q smiled nastily. The doors were soundproof, but there was a little trick he had learned, that perhaps Tris didn't know about. He hit the internal manual button to open the door and immediately afterward hit the button to close. This had the unfortunate side effect-- if it was done right-- of jamming the door a crack open, just enough that sound could come through.

"_First_ of all, you don't tell me you're alive," he heard Tris say angrily. "Did it ever occur to you that there are people who care if you're alive or not? Though after what you just did to Sovaz, I'm not sure why I should. And second of all, why the hell did you try to kill yourself in the first place? You know better than that! Why didn't you get help? And _first_ of all, what you just did to Sovaz is inexcusable! What's gotten into you? That kid worships you. She _cried_ when she heard you'd killed yourself! In the first place, I can't see how you could hurt _anyone_ like that, let alone someone as innocent as Sovaz. Your own sister!"

"Sovaz is not my sister--"

"Don't _give_ me that! You called her your sister for the past five years--"

"You don't understand," T'Laren said coldly. "Sovaz is Soram's sister. When Soram was my husband, Sovaz was my sister. Now that I am no longer married to Soram, I no longer consider Sovaz my relative."

"Oh. I see. All your relationships change completely because you're not married anymore. And I suppose I'm no longer your _taran_, right? After all, you're not married, so _that_ doesn't apply."

The word didn't translate. Q decided to wait for a lull in the conversation before looking it up. Tris continued. "So you don't feel anything for her at all, that's what you're saying? You're just like, oh, well, I guess I don't know her anymore. And even _that_ wouldn't excuse you! Unless you positively _hated_ the kid, you have no excuse for hurting her like that."

"She's Vulcan. She'll cope."

"So if I'd casually told all your co-workers the things you told me in confidence, you'd have coped, because you're Vulcan. Right?"

"I was probably too unwell to cope at the time."

"Oh, but you're fine now. Obviously you've got back your license to practice. Or have you? Does your patient know about your little nervous breakdown? Who re-certified you anyway?"

"Starfleet Medical--"

"And how'd you explain to _them_ how you miraculously survived? 'Oh, I threw myself out of my shuttle, but fortunately a passing inbound space freighter just happened to notice, and beamed me aboard.' Or let me guess. Vulcans can survive up to ten minutes in vacuum, right? Because you're so superior to all the rest of us poor species?"

"I told them my family had been mistaken in certifying me dead." Her voice held just the faintest trace of bitterness. Three weeks ago, Q would never have detected it-- but he heard it now, and he was willing to bet the Bajoran did too. "Soram was divorcing me, after all. He had already severed our link. He could easily have mistaken my death."

"So he divorced you. Well. I'm glad I found _that_ out. That's more than anyone else seems to know. Is that why he said you were dead, then? Because a dead wife is easier to explain than a divorce? Can divorced Vulcans remarry?"

"Of course they-- Soram remarried? You know this?"

"Sovaz told me. And incidentally, she keeps referring to the woman as 'my brother's wife.' _Not_ 'sister'." Tris paused. "Oh, come on, T'Laren. Don't tell me you still care about him. Not after what he did to you!"

"You know nothing about it. You never understood my relationship with Soram."

"No, and I don't think I ever will. I thought Vulcans were too logical to stay in abusive relationships."

Now she sounded angry. "Soram did not abuse me. What happened was my fault, and there was nothing he could have done to save me. He did try, you know. He was never the monster you thought he was."

"Sovaz told me he said he closed his mind to you, when you went off the deep end. I'm sure that did you a _lot_ of good."

"Was he supposed to let me infect him? Few Vulcans can risk being bonded to one who is insane--"

"You keep using that word. You know better. What you had was a nervous breakdown. You did _not_ go _insane_, T'Laren. Not by any definition _I_ ever learned."

"What a Bajoran-- or a human-- would consider insanity, and what a Vulcan would, are two different things."

"Yes, obviously. Since I can't think of a reason for what you did to Sovaz short of that. Are you sure you're well enough to practice? We wouldn't want you harming an important Federation asset because you were insane when you treated him."

"I am in my right mind."

"Then _what_ the hell did you just hurt Sovaz like that for?"

"Very well." T'Laren definitely sounded angry, the distinctive degree of coldness in her voice differentiated from the coldness of mere annoyance. "I did not wish to deal with Sovaz. I did not want to answer her questions, I did not want to be faced with the reminders she presented, and the quickest and most logical fashion of silencing her would be to hurt her feelings. And I no longer wish to discuss the subject."

Tris was silent a moment. "You have really turned into a bitch, haven't you," he said incredulously.

"Apparently so. Now let me pass."

"No. No, I don't buy it. I can't believe that you, of all people, could turn that heartless. Cold, maybe, if you decided to go ultra-Vulcan. That I can buy. But cruel-- no. You'd just have told Sovaz you didn't want to talk about it, twenty times until it got through her head, but you wouldn't have cut her down like that."

"Perhaps you don't know me as well as you think you do."

"Perhaps I don't. But I think I know you well enough to know you usually pull this kind of stunt when you're feeling guilty. I remember when you tried to pull this crap on _me_, remember?"

"I never did that to you."

"You did so. I remember it quite distinctly. I wasn't going to take it then, and I'm not falling for it now. So what're you feeling guilty about?"

"You aren't going to do this to me, Tris. I know the trick. I am not your patient, and I am not about to tell you anything. You can believe anything you like about the incident, but I do not wish to discuss it with you or anyone."

There was a silence for a moment. "Fine," Tris said finally. "We'll talk about this later."

Q hastily moved away from the door, into the foyer of his own bedroom, and pretended to be unpacking as T'Laren came in. He glanced over at her, gauging her mood. She seemed very Vulcan and very withdrawn, and paid no attention to his ostentatious removal of his clothes from his bag, instead making a beeline for the bathroom. He shrugged, and started unpacking in earnest. T'Laren had asked him before why he bothered to bring clothes, when the replicators aboard _Yamato_ could make anything he wanted. Having attempted to get clothes out of a Galaxy-class starship's replicator menu before, though, Q didn't trust _Yamato_'s replicators to keep him in the style to which he'd grown accustomed, so he'd gotten an entire wardrobe out of _Ketaya_'s replicators and lugged it over here. This, unfortunately, required that he unpack the whole thing, to avoid having to live out of his suitcase for two weeks. Vanity was a very taxing business.

While he worked, he spoke quietly to the computer. "Computer. Give me the definition of the word _taran_. Print it on the terminal screen."

"What language?"

"Probably Bajoran. If not, Vulcan."

A definition appeared on the terminal. "_TARAN_, fem. _taransi_. Bajoran. The male lover of a woman who is already married. No close Standard equivalent. Standard equivalent of fem. form is _mistress_." There was more, but Q ignored it. He'd suspected it would be something like that.

The door to the bathroom opened finally, and T'Laren came out. She walked over to the replicator and ordered a cup of Vulcan tea. Q bided his time until she was sitting down, sipping her tea. He stepped out of the bedroom.

"T'Laren. Why didn't you _tell_ me you had such an interesting past?"

"You're incredibly predictable, Q," she murmured without glancing up.

"I never dreamed this conference would be so entertaining," he continued, ignoring T'Laren's comment. "You didn't even tell me you were married. Let alone that you were cheating on him."

That got her attention. "What makes you think I was cheating on my husband?" she asked sharply.

"Oh, come now, T'Laren. I'm not stupid."

"Lack of stupidity hardly means you cannot jump to the wrong conclusion."

"What other conclusion am I expected to draw, my dear doctor? When a young Bajoran man says that he is no longer your _taran_, it does tend to imply that he _was_ at one point. Or are you going to tell me there's some subtlety to the word's translation that I missed? Perhaps in this context it means 'third cousin on the father's side', or something?" This was fun. He hadn't had this much fun in... in... come to think of it, he hadn't had this much fun since he lost his powers. T'Laren's expression was quite delightfully exasperated.

"You were eavesdropping."

"I prefer to think of it as lending a sympathetic ear."

T'Laren stared at him for several seconds in complete exasperated frustration, obviously struggling to find the correct words. "My past is none of your business," she said finally.

"Oh, really? I think it is my business. I seem to recall a little speech about how you were incapable of acting on a sexual temptation? About what a stalwart Vulcan you are and how faithful and ethical and all that? I can't _quite_ see how that squares away with cheating on your husband. Seems like a very un-Vulcan thing to _me. _Now, I admit I'm no expert on Vulcan culture, but..."

"Why do you care?" she asked coldly. "Does the idea that I might have had a private life before I met you disturb you?"

"Not at all! You're far more interesting this way. My respect for you has just gone up enormously."

"Then I don't think I want your respect." She turned back to her tea.

Q walked over to her armchair and leaned over the top of it. "Oh, come now, T'Laren, don't be a wet blanket. I'm a trickster, remember? People who spend their entire lives within the confines of the socially acceptable bore me to tears. I knew you were more interesting than the typical Vulcan before, but now you're positively intriguing. And then, of course, there's that business with your sister." He perched on the armrest of her chair, leaning his arm along the top of it, hovering next to her. "You can't keep me in suspense. Tell me about it."

"No."

"No? She says no? A flat rejection. I'm crushed, T'Laren, truly I am." He stood up. "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I told you all the humiliating and sordid little stories you demanded of _me_."

"I am your psychologist. The relationship is not reciprocal."

"If you keep saying that, I'll start to think you don't love me."

She looked up at him. "You think this is extremely funny, don't you."

"Funny?... Oh, no, no, I wouldn't say 'funny'. Amusing, yes. Entertaining, certainly. But not exactly a knee-slapping, ripsnorting form of entertainment, no."

"You're an incredible hypocrite."

"A hypocrite? Moi?" That hurt a bit, actually, though he was damned if he'd show it. Q had spent most of his existence despising hypocrisy. "How am I a hypocrite?"

"Three days ago you were furious because you believed that humans laughed at your suffering. But you find other people's suffering extremely entertaining, don't you. You haven't truly changed at all; the only difference between you now and the omnipotent bully you used to be is that you're no longer omnipotent."

He smiled coldly. "Them's fightin' words, darlin'," he said. "In the mood for a three hour argument?"

T'Laren set down her tea on the table. "You have no other forms of entertainment available to you, do you? When you're not brutalizing others, or enjoying their pain, you're arguing with them. You can't be happy unless you're antagonizing someone somehow."

"Well." He picked up her tea and sipped at it, watching her reaction with amused eyes. "It's no secret that I like to argue."

Her eyes narrowed slightly. "It's also no secret that you are deliberately and grossly obnoxious."

Q set down the tea. "You get what you ask for."

T'Laren shook her head. "No. You returned kindness with thoughtlessness and cruelty. People may _now_ treat you badly, but the cycle started with you."

"Did it now?"

"Yes."

"I wonder. You ever meet Dr. Taget, T'Laren?"

"No."

"He's a Tellarite. And a very typical one at that, obnoxious, argumentative, loud-mouthed--"

"You must have gotten along so well."

Q smiled thinly but didn't otherwise acknowledge the sortie. "I researched Dr. Taget a bit. At one point in his career, there had been death threats made. He'd managed to offend someone, I forget what it was, a Nausicaan or something like that. Something bigger than he was, hairier, and meaner. And because Dr. Taget was so well-respected, he was assigned a bodyguard while he was traveling on a Starfleet ship. This bodyguard was killed. Did Security turn on Dr. Taget? Brutalize him? Make him believe he would be killed? Did the captain of the ship he was on dismiss his complaints?"

"I take it the answer is 'no.'"

"You are so correct. The answer is a resounding 'no.' Actually, Dr. Taget, for all that he had nothing good to say about anyone else, had only glowing terms to speak of Starfleet security in. And this is not the only example I have." Q turned away. "Because I look human, and am expected to play by human rules, I have been systematically subjected to much greater indignities than any obvious alien. For that matter, I've been subjected to greater indignities than most humans. I've done a bit of research on the treatment of suicide attempts, for one thing, and nearly everything that should have been done after my second try wasn't. Whether Anderson was willing to admit it or not, her tactics smacked unpleasantly of trying to punish me for attempting to kill myself. Everything I've read indicates that that was exactly the wrong thing to do. If I _had_ successfully done myself in this last time, it would have been the fault of Starbase 56's personnel as much as if not more than my own."

"You're trying to tell me that Starbase 56 drove you to suicide?"

Q was somewhat surprised by her skeptical tone-- wasn't that T'Laren's own theory? But then, she was probably playing devil's advocate. "Why did I change my mind so quickly after leaving the base?" he asked rhetorically. "Right at this moment, I feel so much better than I have since we defeated the Borg that I might almost be a different person. The only dramatic change in my life has been leaving Starbase 56. And considering that it was _you_ who recommended the treatment, dear doctor, I would not argue against my point too vehemently if I were you."

"The climate on Starbase 56 was certainly an important factor. But I think you're trying to shift the blame off yourself onto them. You seem, in fact, to be trying to blame everything unpleasant that's happened since you lost your powers on either Starbase 56 personnel or humanity in general."

"Oh, I wouldn't say 'everything'. Most of what I've gone through has to do with rampant ingratitude and/or people who just won't let bygones be bygones, not necessarily humanity. Humanity, in fact, has been rather good about the bygones thing, although the gratitude part could use some work."

T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "Gratitude? For what?"

"For my services, of course. And for the knowledge that enabled the Federation to defeat a practically invincible enemy--"

"We have only your word for it that they were practically invincible."

"Then don't take my word for it. Ask the Melgaani. Oh, wait-- you can't, the Borg destroyed them. All right, ask one of the few remaining El-Aurians. You can find one aboard the _Enterprise_\-- in fact, you and she are pals. Of course, you can't expect her to _tell_ you anything, because her people don't believe in giving out information to such lowly short-lived creatures as yourselves, even when they call such creatures friends-- but I digress. You could go to the planet Tarvisti Seven, to the ruins of the Dream Domes, and open your mind to the psionic emanations. It might destroy you, but you'd get a very up close and personal look at just how invincible the Borg used to be." Q flung himself into a chair. "Besides, while that's the most important thing I've done for the Federation, it's hardly the only thing. In fact, if Starfleet weren't such complete hypocrites about the Prime Directive, they should by all rights have refused my offer of knowledge. Maximum warp is now 9.8, up from 9.6. I've deliberately avoided giving them transwarp, but that still means that the fastest Federation ships are faster than anything the Romulans or Cardassians or Tholians have. Defensive shields have increased in power by 60%. Weapons systems aren't particularly more powerful, except when fighting species with advanced multiphasic shields like the Borg, but there they're something like 600% times as efficient. Why do you think the Cardassians suddenly decided to give up worlds like Bajor? They can't afford to keep a military presence on a world so rife with terrorists when they have to play scramble to catch up to Federation tech. Which is why the Federation has free access to the Bajoran wormhole, something that would _not_ have happened had the Cardassians still been holding the area. The Federation is in a _much_ better strategic position vis-à-vis everybody than they were three years ago. And we haven't even mentioned the theoretical value of all the information I've given you people."

"All of which was rendered as payment for protection. Protecting you has cost the Federation 14 lives. Obviously, they consider the price to be worth it. But expecting gratitude into the bargain is a little much even for you."

"And what is this 'even for you' nonsense? When did you suddenly become a member of the Chorus for the Litany of Q's Crimes Against the Universe?"

"I have always been aware of your flaws. It is important to make sure you know them and are working to overcome them, or all the social polish in the universe will not help you."

"That's a terribly naive attitude. Villains who smile are better-loved than the good-hearted but socially inept. If I had all the social polish in the universe, I could be a monstrosity and I'd still get people to like me."

"My conscience would be eased tremendously if I will be able to look back on my work with you and conclude that you did not end up a monstrosity."

"So be more precise, T'Laren. Are you saying that I _am_ a monstrosity, or that you're afraid I'll become one?"

"What would you call someone who is entertained by the pain of others?"

Q smiled coolly. "A normal human being." He leaned forward. "Don't take that self-righteous attitude with me. You pretend you know something about human nature, so either you're deceiving yourself or you're an enormous hypocrite. Are you going to deny to me that human beings enjoy scandal? That the unveiling of others' mysterious pasts excites them? That they might find the notion that a person who had presented herself as above temptation turns out to be just as much mortal clay as they are, if not more so, intriguing? Any human would have the same reaction to this whole business with your sister and the Bajoran fellow. I'm just honest enough to admit it."

"And tactless enough?"

"Oh, they're the same thing. Can't have honesty and tact at the same time."

"But you typically display neither trait."

"I have been brutally honest with you, T'Laren. I've told you things I've told no other being alive. I've never once lied to you."

"Perhaps. But you have a reputation for being... somewhat cavalier with your concept of truth."

"There's no such thing as absolute truth. Only beings as ignorant as you mortals could even devise the concept. There are as many truths on any given topic as there are beings who know of that topic. Since I'm no longer near-omniscient, of course, I'm limited to my own version of a given truth, but I don't make the mistake of believing that truth is absolute."

"You might try to be a little more objective--"

"_Objective? _That's another mortal concept. How can you possibly be objective? The act of observation changes that which is observed. No one sits outside the universe and watches from on high, not even the Q. And besides, each individual brings so many biases to his perceptions that nothing of any significance can be perceived in any fashion remotely close to objectively. You Vulcans are positively ridiculous in your belief that you can overcome your biases and view the universe objectively. Through the filter of logic, and you claim _that's_ objectivity! Logic's just another bias!"

"We are not discussing Vulcans, Q. We're discussing you."

It figured. Get into an interesting philosophical argument-- especially one where his experience gave him the high ground-- and she would try to drag the conversation back around to his shortcomings. Q refused to let his good mood be sullied by her obstinacy. "No no no, we're discussing Vulcans. In particular, a single individual Vulcan who _claims_ to be objective, who _believes_ she can transcend her own emotional biases when she wants to, and yet who gets on a moral high horse about something that everyone does and is perfectly normal just because _she's_ uncomfortable with it. What are you complaining about, T'Laren? That I am an evil nasty person who delights in the pain of others, or that _you_ are embarrassed to have so much of your sordid past revealed?"

"You know nothing of my past."

"Admittedly you haven't been exactly forthcoming on the topic. So I've had to take what little I can get."

"Q, I have a right to privacy. My life is not a soap opera for your amusement."

"But don't I have the right to know the person I'm dealing with?"

"If it were--"

The door chime interrupted. "Enter!" Q caroled gleefully, hoping a visitor might spice things up still more.

He was not disappointed. Sovaz stood in the doorway, hands clasped in front of her at her waist. "Q?"

"Come on in! Make yourself at home. My apartment is your apartment. What _can_ I do for you, dear girl?"

Sovaz entered, but not very far. "I have my own apartment," she said politely. "I see no need to share yours, but thank you for the offer."

Q turned to T'Laren. "Did you ever think about teaching a course in human idioms at the Vulcan Science Academy or something?"

T'Laren had gone completely stone-faced again. "No."

"Well, _someone_ should." He turned back to Sovaz. "It's an expression, Lieutenant. It means you should relax and make use of whatever I own for the sake of your personal comfort. And please don't tell me that Vulcans are incapable of being comfortable or something silly like that."

"I am quite comfortable," Sovaz said, "except of course for the fact that human-normal environments are always cold and damp, but I'm used to that. Is this expression a social amenity?"

"Did you ever meet an android named Data?"

"Once. When I was posted to the _Feynman_ three years ago, we shared scientific data with the _Enterprise_, and I had an opportunity to speak to Commander Data. I asked him a great many questions, and he answered all of them. I was quite pleased; most people don't try to answer all my questions. Why do you ask?"

"Because you sound like him."

Sovaz thought about it. "I think perhaps it's a resemblance that's only obvious to humans. I can't detect it."

"Ah. So, what brings you here?" He was peripherally aware of T'Laren standing utterly still, as if she could negate her own presence by being unmoving. Sooner or later Q _had_ to find out what was going on between these two.

"I have come to invite you to a reception tonight for conference guests at 1900 hours. You may, of course, bring members of your entourage." Her voice was formal and precise, and she carefully _not-_looked at T'Laren with a visible effort. Q grinned.

"Well. Let me ask my entourage." He turned to T'Laren. "Entourage, how does a reception at 1900 sound?"

"If you wish to attend, I will of course go with you."

"I love Vulcan precision. Not a hint about how _you_ might feel about the concept. Ah well, if you have no feelings you can't get upset if I run roughshod over them, can you?" He turned back to Sovaz. "Sounds marvelous. Formal attire?"

"Yes."

"Wonderful. This gets better and better. And you'll be there?"

"I'm _Yamato_'s science department's liaison to the conference. I must attend."

"Well, if you go into it with _that_ attitude, you won't have any fun at all." Q walked over to where Sovaz stood near the door and leaned on the wall behind her, hovering over her. "I'll tell you what. If you'll promise not to be a complete stuffy Vulcan, I'll promise not to make everyone else at the reception's life a living hell. Sound good to you?"

"I am a Vulcan," Sovaz said, sounding confused, "so I can't oblige you on that part. In this context, what do the adjectives 'complete' and 'stuffy' mean?"

Q pointed at T'Laren. "See her?"

For the first time, Sovaz looked at T'Laren. "Yes."

"_That_ is a complete stuffy Vulcan. Note the frigid posture, the stony face, the total lack of animation. Sad, really, since T'Laren's usually a much more interesting person, but apparently she decided that being interesting was hideously embarrassing. Now, would you rather be interesting, or would you rather look like that?"

"I'd rather be interesting," Sovaz said definitely. "If I promise not to be a complete stuffy Vulcan, will you answer all my questions?"

"_All_ your questions? Frankly, that depends on how many you have and how much detail you need on them. I get paid for this, you know. But I'm sure I could see fit to toss a few freebies your way."

"Is a freebie a kind of frisbee?"

Q stared. "'Frisbee?'"

"A kind of toy that humans use to practice throwing skills, vector calculation and social cooperation. My sis-- T'Laren taught me how to use a frisbee once. It was very educational. But I had somewhat more abstract questions in mind, actually. I already understand the physics of frisbees fairly well."

"No. A freebie is a free gift. Gratis. Without charge." He turned to T'Laren with a huge grin. "Frisbees? My dear doctor. You _have_ been corrupting this child, haven't you."

"No, she hasn't," Sovaz said, sounding slightly defensive. "Frisbees are very useful for helping children learn how to--"

"It was a facetious comment, Lieutenant. A joke, in other words. You aren't supposed to take it seriously." He sighed. "What _do_ they teach them these days?"

Sovaz apparently figured out that that was a rhetorical question. "I need to deliver other invitations. But you will be there?"

"I wouldn't miss it."

She nodded, and left.

* * *

T'Laren expected and feared that the argument would continue after Sovaz left. Instead Q went into his bedroom and occupied himself with removing various articles of clothing that he'd just packed, trying them on, and staring at himself in the mirror as if his appearance were a painting he was thinking of revising heavily. She retreated to her own room, requested the computer to shut the door-- individual rooms in the suite apparently didn't shut their doors automatically-- and unpacked the few items she had bothered to bring aboard.

The door to the bedroom opened. Q stood there in a black jumpsuit with glittering gold piping and a short gold jacket. "What do you think?"

"What do I think of what?"

"Of the _outfit_, of course."

"I think it's a bit flamboyant, actually."

"Flamboyant? _Flamboyant?_" Q shook his head rapidly. "No no no. What a deprived young woman. Do you want to see flamboyant?" He departed and returned a moment later with a medieval Renaissance costume held up to him. "_This_ is flamboyant."

She was certainly not going to contradict him. "Why do you have that... outfit... with you at all?" T'Laren asked, trying not to sound overwhelmed with incredulity.

"Well, in case I felt like wearing it, of course. Why do you think?" He put the costume down and glared at her. "Are you going to wear _that_?"

T'Laren was dressed in a formal gray shipsuit with darker gray quilted shoulders and some black edging. It had served perfectly well for coming aboard the _Yamato_, and she couldn't see why it wouldn't serve for the formal reception. "Yes."

Q rolled his eyes. "Fate spare me from the fashion-illiterate." He shook his head. "You can't wear that. Please tell me you're just trying to get back at me and you actually had no intention of wearing that."

"I really don't see what's wrong with it."

"It's _boring! _It's dull, it's stuffy, it's hideous, it turns your skin gray and it makes you look at least fifty years older. Would you wear something with a little color in it, at least, so I needn't die from mortification that I'm associated with you?"

"It is perfectly acceptable," T'Laren said, with just a touch more sharpness than she'd intended. "I hardly see the need to take fashion advice from a man who's been known to dress as a 22nd-century starship captain, a 16th-century fop-- and a 21st-century judge."

"Oh, you're going to blame me for the judge? Blame humanity; _I_ didn't come up with the costume."

"But you dressed in it."

"To make a point."

"What sort of point did you intend to make by dressing as a Starfleet captain from two hundred years ago?"

"I was protesting that they wouldn't let me wear a Starfleet uniform. Besides, I freely admit those things were flamboyant and silly. They were always intended to be. But this-- this is just a disaster, T'Laren. It makes you look like-- like--" He paused, as if at a loss for words, and finally sputtered, "like a _Vulcan!_"

"I am a Vulcan."

"That's no excuse. Look." He strode into her room and walked over to the clothing replicator. "Menu."

"Q--"

"This one looks nice," he said, scrutinizing the menu. "And this isn't half bad. And the green in this one would go marvelously with your bloodshot eyes--"

"Q!" T'Laren walked over to him. "I have no intention of changing my outfit to please your outrageous sensibilities. Will you get away from my replicator, or will I be forced to bodily remove you?"

He wagged his finger at her. "Touchy, touchy, touchy. And here I thought I couldn't offend you."

"I was wrong."

"You certainly were. That shade of gray was _never_ meant to be worn by a humanoid-- except perhaps a Cardassian, but then they hardly count as humanoid, do they." He turned back to the replicator. "A 401A, in my friend's size."

"It doesn't have my size. I haven't stepped into the measuring unit."

"Ah, but _this_, my dear, is a _Galaxy_-class starship. Not one of those little bathtub tugs you're accustomed to serving on." The replicator produced an outfit. Q removed it with a flourish and unrolled it in front of her. "Voila!"

Despite herself, T'Laren was forced to admit that the shipsuit Q was presenting her with _was_, in fact, better-looking. Her current attire was conservative and sedate; this was professional, sharp, attractive without the excessive flashiness she'd have expected from something Q would pick out. It was in gray and dark green, not much more colorful than what she wore, but she could tell that it would, in fact, flatter her coloring much better.

She studied Q for a moment, trying to decide whether this was a power game or a particularly obnoxious way of making a peace offering. "It's quite attractive," she finally said.

"So you agree with me! Go on, try it on. I'll go in the other room and cover my eyes."

"No." She took the shipsuit from him and hung it up in her closet. "I will wear what I'm wearing." She turned to face him. "I'm not your dress-up doll, Q."

"No, of course not. But I _had_ thought we were friends."

__

_After your performance today? I wouldn't wish to see the way you treat your enemies._

_"Perhaps we are," she offered evenly._

"Well, as a concerned friend, it would ill behoove me to let you go out like that. Friends don't _let_ friends dress like Vulcan schoolmarms."

"Vulcan schoolmarms wear dark brown robes. And I don't think you intend a gesture of friendship, Q, not after your behavior today."

"What, because I argue with someone means I can't be their friend?"

"When you repeatedly bring up points that obviously cause another person pain, refusing to back off when you're asked, and make light of an evidently traumatic situation, it is hard to imagine why the other person would want to call you friend." She turned away quite deliberately and crossed the room, turning back only when she had placed the bed between them.

"Ah." Q's expression had gone very masklike. For a moment she regretted the harsh words-- but he had to learn. "In that case, I'll leave you to your no doubt vital activities, Doctor." He turned and pivoted back through the door into the suite, which swooshed shut behind him.

Either he was giving a remarkably good show of wounded pride, or she had actually hurt his feelings. Could it be that after all this time, he still didn't realize that being obnoxious was not a good way to reach out to people? That if he wished to be another person's friend, he should refrain from harassing them? _Had_ this been Q's idea of a peace offering? If that was the case, she really had a lot further to go with him than she'd thought back on _Ketaya_\-- unless he'd backslid. That could have happened, too.

The trouble was that she had no objectivity right now. She remembered telling Anderson that Q couldn't offend her unless she allowed it... but she hadn't thought she might be faced with Sovaz. Fate was capable of cruel jokes. Or perhaps Lhoviri had arranged this? Sovaz's presence could be explained by Lhoviri's sick sense of humor. Or by her own carelessness. She should have checked the crew listings. But then, who could have expected this? To have both Sovaz and Tris on the same ship, and then to have T'Laren come to that ship unaware-- that had to be someone's idea of a joke.

She had barely managed to maintain control. The moment she'd seen Sovaz, all her carefully constructed barriers against her own memories had begun to crash, and she remembered the last time she'd seen Sovaz--

__

_\--Her hands were dyed green, her clothing splotched with emerald. She stared stupidly at her hands, unable to understand where all the green had come from. The acrid smell of copper and salt tickled the back of her throat, and she trembled, an atavistic reaction to the scent of blood. Where had the blood come from?_

_Her eyes followed the green drops down to the floor, where they pooled. Her face reflected in the pool, her expression confused. Something had happened. What had happened?_

_Then she tracked down to Soram, lying still in the center of the pool, and time stopped._

_The door opened. She looked up, a frightened animal, and saw Sovaz. A look of horror shattered the girl's calm features, to be replaced by a cold mask that denied all emotion, all innocence, all goodness in the universe. The innocence, the sense of wonder in the girl's eyes shriveled and died._

_"You have killed my brother," Sovaz said, and it was the death knell for her childhood... and T'Laren had killed it..._

She pressed her hands to her temples, trying to shut out the vision of Sovaz's shattered innocence. It hadn't happened. Sovaz didn't remember how her older sister had betrayed her, destroyed her, because it hadn't happened.

__

_"All right!" The entity flung his arms in the air. "What do you need? Tell me what you need to want to live. I can do anything you want. What will it take, for you to agree to live?"_

_She hesitated. He asked for impossibilities. But he had already demonstrated that he could do impossibilities._

_"My husband," she whispered. "I cannot live so long as he does not."_

_"You want me to bring him back? Like I did you?"_

_"I want him to have never died. I want to have never killed him."_

_He paused, seeming to think about it. "Okay," he said finally. "That's what you want? That's what you'll get. It'll never have happened."_

...never have happened...

But it _had_. She remembered it if no one else could. She remembered how Sovaz had looked, and the awful feeling of desolation that had overwhelmed her when she saw the girl's expression, worse even than the horror of realizing what she'd done to Soram. And she couldn't stop remembering. How was she supposed to face Sovaz, knowing what she'd done to the girl?

How was she supposed to face Sovaz after the cruel way she'd rejected the girl today?

__

_But I didn't want to hurt her. I just wanted her not to-- not to look at me so worshipfully, so happily, as if she were overjoyed to find me alive, when I don't deserve--_

It hadn't happened.

"Lhoviri," she whispered. "I can't do this." She sat down heavily. "You're supposed to be omnipotent," she told the air quietly. "You could have fixed me better than this, surely."

__

_Do you expect me to do everything for you? You have to stand on your own feet sometime, T'Laren._

She had no idea whether the reply came from Lhoviri or her own mind. But whoever had said it, they were right. _This incident has destroyed my objectivity. I should be concentrating on helping Q, not wallowing in my own pain. That's what Lhoviri is paying for, anyway. That is why it didn't happen._T'Laren stared at the outfit Q had given her, replaying the scene with Q in her mind and analyzing it. He had expressed interest, amusement, even glee at the situation with Tris, Sovaz and herself. He had mocked her for her relationship with Tris-- but he was right on one level. She had told Q she was not attracted to him, nor would she pursue him if she was, and that much was true. But she had also told him she was capable of resisting temptation, and that she had no desire to have sex with a man she couldn't meld with-- and that was demonstrably false. T'Laren remembered the humans she'd picked up in seedy bars on out-of-the-way starbases or planetary shore leave, desperately trying to convince herself that if she didn't meld with them she wasn't betraying Soram. She remembered Tris, and how close she had come to divorcing Soram for him. And while she was torturing herself, why didn't she go ahead and remember Melor? How many people had she betrayed by going to bed with him, and in how many different ways?

Physician, heal thyself.

No. This was counterproductive. Q had hurt her because, on this topic, she felt a great deal of guilt and could easily be hurt. It was Q's nature to probe for weaknesses-- he could hardly be blamed for that at this stage of his development. If she had truly thought for a moment that she had made great strides with him, she was a fool. She _knew_ better-- psychological treatment involved no miracle cures. Q trusted her and would probably not be a complete ass to her in the absence of other social stimuli, most of the time. Give him other people to interact with, however, and he would... be himself. And if that hurt her, that was her failing for allowing it.

So. Q had been amused by the fact that she'd turned out to be fallible. This was understandable. He had tried to charm Sovaz at T'Laren's expense. Given how T'Laren had behaved toward Sovaz, however, he wasn't even entirely wrong to do that. He had found the whole situation with her past coming back to haunt her entertaining-- but he was right; it was a natural human reaction and it was only because Q was completely tactless and allowed his amusement to show so blatantly that it had been so hurtful. Which meant... he was being an ass, but probably not maliciously so. And so the offer of the suit might not have been the opening move of a power game. It might have been a peace offering.

But this brought her back to the beginning, because she _still_ couldn't tell which. So she considered consequences. If she rejected a peace offering, Q would be hurt-- and he had seemed to be hurt; surely it couldn't have entirely been her comment about friends that elicited that reaction-- unless it had been faked? But why would he fake being hurt? Q might ostentatiously play at being wounded, but he always made it obvious that it was play, a defense against the notion that she might actually hurt him. There was nothing for him to gain by a sincere pretense at pain. And Q would not be hurt if she rejected a power gambit. He would shrug, smile and try again. If he backed off, he'd do so in such a fashion to imply that he was conceding temporarily, or the game no longer amused him-- not that he'd gotten hurt.

T'Laren picked up the outfit. It _was_ better-looking, and Q's obsession with clothing was quite genuine. He could mock or parody his own obsessions-- as witness the Renaissance outfit-- but they were no less real. Q might really have considered the question of her attire to be important, and have been trying, in his typical obnoxious fashion, to save her from what he perceived to be an embarrassment. It seemed likely that she had assumed it was a power gambit simply because she was annoyed at him, and because she considered clothing a trivial issue.

* * *

Ten minutes later she went to the door of Q's room and pushed the door chime.

The door swished open. "Fancy meeting you here," Q said, and then his eyes fell on the outfit. "Aha. I see you had a sudden attack of fashion sense."

"I decided I would take your word for it," she said. "One as obsessed with clothing as you can hardly help but have a better sense for such things."

He nodded approvingly. "It's quite attractive, if I do say so myself. You could still do something with your hair, but then I'm not about to push my luck."

"A wise decision." As T'Laren stepped further into the room, Q's own appearance registered on her. Her eyebrows went up. He had changed clothing again, this time choosing a suit in dark red and grey that was far less flamboyant than the previous black and gold. He had also done something to his hair-- made it less obvious how little of it there was, and gotten the gray in it to concentrate at the temples instead of being scattered throughout. The most startling change, however, was that he seemed to have gained back all the weight he'd lost over the past three years. Q had never been built bulkily, but when he'd been omnipotent his mass had been enough, combined with his height, to make him formidable-looking. Over the past three years, in the holos she'd seen of him, he'd grown more and more gaunt, and less and less impressive-looking, until finally he'd wound up in sickbay looking like a matchstick. He had always been able to lessen the gauntness with clothing somewhat; now, though, he seemed to have actually gotten rid of it. Only his hands betrayed him.

He noticed her stare. "Impressive, isn't it? It's taken me close to an hour just to get to this point, and I still haven't put makeup on yet." Q turned to the mirror, where he had ranged a large number of cosmetics. "You can watch if you want, it won't bother me."

"It is impressive. It must be uncomfortable, though."

"Oh, astonishingly. I can't sit down." He took what looked like a surgical scanner and ran it over his face, leaning against the mirror. "Beauty is pain." This was intoned with such solemnity that she knew he would have to turn around and grin at her. He did so, satisfying her faith in her ability to predict Q.

"Why do you do it, then?" she asked. "I would think you would consider physical appearance to be completely superficial."

"Absolutely. By definition, even. Couldn't agree more."

"So why--"

"Because, except for Vulcans-- and you people are extremely weird; I don't think you have any idea how much of an aberration Vulcans are-- nearly all species on this evolutionary level judge others by appearances. And humans are among the worst of the bunch." He turned to face her. "When I was on Starbase 56, it was in a sense my territory. People came there to see me. I was by definition the center of attention, the most important person there, whatever you want to call it, so it hardly mattered what I looked like, people were going to respect me and listen to me anyway-- at least to the extent that they ever did. Not to mention I was utterly miserable, and so it seemed appropriate that I look the part." Q turned back to the mirror, using several specialized tools to apply cosmetics to the top half of his face. He seemed to be flattening wrinkles and then recoloring the skin. "Now, though, I am no longer on my own territory. If I want to receive the sort of respect I've grown accustomed to, I need to use every tool at my disposal-- which includes making my physical appearance as impressive as possible."

T'Laren nodded slowly. "That's very interesting."

"I detect the drawing of a dissection scalpel. What's very interesting?"

"You recognize the necessity of using superficial appearance to manipulate others. But it doesn't seem to have occurred to you to develop the same sort of techniques to improve your social appearance."

"Oh, don't. Puh-_lease_." He glanced over at her. His face seemed not to fit together properly-- the top half was evenly colored and largely unlined, the forehead and eyes of a man in the prime of his life. The lower, unfinished half, however, was even more pale and drawn than usual in comparison, and the effect was that of a man with a very lifelike mask over one half of his face. Which half was the mask, though, was indeterminate, since he'd already brought his hair and body in line with the lies his upper face told. "Believe it or not, T'Laren, I am capable of being socially competent when I want to be. I have even on occasion been called charming. I realize this must be a shock to you."

"You can't sustain it. And you seem to have very little desire to do it as a general rule."

"You're right, but then I don't usually go around in such an elaborate costuming job that I can barely move, either."

"You do realize that you are not going to be the constant center of attention. The conference attendees all have more or less equal status. If you came here expecting they would hang on your every word, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed."

"Oh, I don't need to be the _constant_ center of attention." He turned and grinned at her. "Merely semi-constant."

"Even that much might be too much to hope for."

"It's not, I assure you. I can easily ensure that people pay attention to me. I can even do it without being excessively annoying." His grin broadened. "Shocking, but true."

T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "You seem to be in an unusually good mood today."

"Oh, I am."

"Do you have any idea why?"

Q lost the smile. "Let's not dissect my mood until it's dead, shall we?"

"As you wish."

He stepped back from the mirror, examining himself. The makeup job seemed complete to T'Laren, but Q was apparently unsatisfied, leaning back in to do minor touch-ups that seemed not to produce any appreciable change. "How does it look?"

"Very thorough. One would never imagine you spent two weeks on life support a mere month ago."

"No, one wouldn't, would one?" He turned to her. "Is it necessary to say you're my psychologist? I realize you've already blown it in front of the crew, but then I don't really care what Commander Clean-Cut and his band of merry men think of me."

"There's no stigma attached to having a personal therapist, Q."

"So say personal therapist. Not psychologist. Not psychiatrist, either, which is actually what you said you were."

"Did I?" She thought back. He was right. "I'm sorry. I was-- distraught. It was an inaccurate description, since I'm not in fact a psychiatrist, and it was unnecessary even had it been true."

"For once I won't argue with you."

The door to the suite chimed. T'Laren started toward the door. "It's most likely Sovaz," Q pointed out. As she held back, he stepped ahead of her and went to the door. "Come in!"

It was, in fact, Sovaz. T'Laren noted that the girl's hair had gotten overlong again. Sovaz tried to keep her hair in a bowl cut, for the eminently logical reason that she didn't want to fuss with it, but she was constantly forgetting to get her hair cut. Her straight bangs were starting to flop into her eyes. She almost opened her mouth to say, "Sovakam, you need a haircut," out of habit, but her mind caught up with her in time.

"Will you need an escort to Ten-Forward?" Sovaz asked.

"Ten-_Forward?_" Q hesitated. "Right. This is a Galaxy-class starship, isn't it. You frightened me there for a moment."

"Why would you be frightened of the presence of Ten-Forward?"

"An old... acquaintance of mine runs the Ten-Forward lounge on the _Enterprise_. Someone who I would much prefer never to see again in my life. And certainly, if you want to escort me, by all means do. I've never had to find my way from VIP quarters to the Ten-Forward lounge on a Galaxy-class starship before." He turned to T'Laren. "Come along, entourage."

As they headed for Ten-Forward, Sovaz began talking. "The conference doesn't officially start until tomorrow at 1500 hours. Nearly everyone is here; the only exceptions are Professor Yalit and Dr. Pergiun. Have you ever met either of them?"

"Pergiun I've met. He's a pompous ass. Yalit I've never even _heard_ of."

"There's widespread speculation as to her race. Since she hasn't been seen in person in sixty years, all anyone has to go on is records from her time at the Makropyrios. She bears some physical resemblance to Ferengi, but of course Ferengi females are forbidden by law from leaving the Ferengi homeworld, except to go to a colony world, of course, which in any case the Makropyrios is not. I believe they're also forbidden from learning to read, or any other form of higher education. I had a fascinating discussion with a Ferengi, in which he was trying to explain to me the reasons why his species organizes their gender roles in such fashion. I thought it was a highly illogical system, myself. He wanted information on Vulcan mating habits in exchange, in particular my personal experiences, and I had to tell him I had no personal experience in that particular area. I believe he thought I cheated him. This is considered a grave offense among the Ferengi. I find this hard to reconcile with the fact that they are well-known for cheating other species, but he assured me that this was not so."

"Lieutenant?"

"Yes?"

"I _really_ don't care about the Ferengi."

"Oh. If I am discussing a topic of little interest to you, feel free to tell me to be quiet. Everyone else does."

"I'll keep that in mind," Q said. They reached Ten-Forward, not a moment too soon in T'Laren's opinion. "Oh, and Lieutenant?"

"Yes?"

Q shook his head gravely. "Do _something_ with your hair."

* * *

As they entered Ten-Forward, Sovaz left them, running off to nursemaid another set of VIPs. T'Laren wondered whose brilliant idea it was to put the girl in charge of liaison duties-- it was not always a good idea to leave Sovaz in charge of fastening her own uniform properly, let alone playing diplomat to an entire conference full of undoubtedly pompous and arrogant people. For just a moment, T'Laren wished for her Starfleet rank back-- counselors from other ships in the fleet had a great deal more business asking a commanding officer why he was placing a subordinate in a completely inappropriate position than civilian psychologists had. But she pushed the thought away-- it was not her place to worry about Sovaz anymore. Obviously Sovaz had learned to take care of herself-- she had been promoted, hadn't she? She no longer needed an older sister to watch over her-- and if she did, she was in trouble, because she didn't have one anymore. T'Laren hadn't the time to worry about anyone but Q.

The object of her worries was standing a few feet in from the door, peering about through the multi-species gathering as if trying to decide who it would be most entertaining to inflict his presence on first. The decision was taken out of his hands, however, by a voice from the left. "I _know_ you, don't I?"

T'Laren turned. For a second, she didn't recognize the man; she wasn't expecting to see anyone else she knew, and if she had been, she'd have expected to see someone from her past, before Q. She certainly didn't expect to see someone from Starbase 56. So it took a second or two to realize that she knew the lieutenant in a blue dress uniform, and another second to recognize him as Harry Roth.

"You could be right," Q said. "You look vaguely familiar. It's entirely possible that we've met."

"I'm sure of it," Roth said firmly. "I'd never forget a face like yours. I _just_ can't place your _name_."

"It's such a difficult name to remember," Q murmured. He put on a show of thinking about it. "No, I can't remember your name either. I'm drawing a complete blank."

"Don't you hate when that happens?"

T'Laren watched with some bemusement. She had never seen the two of them interacting; she had only Roth's word for it that they had any better a relationship than Q'd had with anyone on Starbase 56, and Q himself had seemed to contradict Roth. This, however, seemed like the kind of banter one would see between actual friends. "Tremendously," Q said. "It ruins my entire week." He frowned. "Perhaps if I knew where you were last stationed, that might provide a clue."

"Hmm... I was last stationed on... that's right, it was Starbase 56."

"Well, now! I've spent the past three years on Starbase 56."

"So have I! What a coincidence! You think that's where we met?"

"It seems likely." Q pretended to think again. "I'm sure I could remember. It's just that your face is so nondescript. Perhaps another clue...?"

Behind T'Laren, Tris's voice murmured, "These two know each other, I take it?"

"Rather well, I think," she murmured back.

"Exactly _how_ well is rather well?"

Remembering Tris, and the way his mind worked, it was obvious what he meant. "Not _that_ well, I believe."

Roth snapped his fingers. "No, I remember you now! You're K, aren't you?"

"One down, twenty-five to go," Q said. "You're seeming a bit more familiar yourself-- is it... Harold Godfrey?"

Roth shuddered dramatically. "Not even in jest, Q," he said. T'Laren presumed Harold Godfrey was a private joke of some sort.

Q smiled broadly. "Oh, _Harry!_" He grabbed Roth's shoulder and hugged him in a parody of friendliness. "How've you _been?_"

T'Laren raised an eyebrow. Q released Roth before the other man made any attempt to get free. "Can't complain," Roth said. "And you? You look much better."

"I'd better. Considering what I looked like the last time you saw me." Q jerked a thumb at T'Laren. "This creature's been making me exercise."

"Is that true?" Roth demanded, wide-eyed. "Have you actually forced this poor being to engage in strenuous physical activity?"

"Vulcans cannot lie," T'Laren said, deadpan. "I admit it."

"How shocking! How astounding! I salute you, dear lady-- you've done the impossible." Roth turned to Tris. "This is the most astonishing Vulcan I've met, did you know?"

"We've met before," Tris said calmly. "T'Laren's got a number of astonishing talents."

There was no way Roth, of all people, would miss that one. T'Laren resisted the temptation to glare at Tris, and kept her face impassive as Roth raised both eyebrows. "Is that so?"

"Are you having fun without me, Harry?" a woman asked. "It's against Starfleet regs."

The newcomer was an apparently human woman, a lieutenant commander in blue with dusky skin and long black hair. "Commander Dhawan, what a delight!" Roth said. "Q, T'Laren, this is Shahrazad Dhawan, chief science officer on this lovely ship. Commander, this is Q--"

"We've met," Dhawan said flatly. T'Laren gathered the distinct impression that if she'd realized Roth was talking to Q, she wouldn't have come over.

"Have we?" Q asked. "I can't say I remember... though, of course, I've met so many petty little science people."

Before Dhawan could react, Roth charged in. "And this is Dr. T'Laren, his psychologist. Dr. T'Laren is the most astonishing Vulcan, Commander. Not only does she tell jokes, but she actually managed to get Q to exercise." He glanced at Q slyly. "I'll be polite and keep from speculating on what sort of exercise program, exactly."

Q smiled cheerily. "Good for you. Because if you did, I'd have to say something vicious and scathing, and we'd all prefer to remain civilized at a gathering of the Federation's finest minds. Which reminds me, Harry, what _are_ you doing here?"

Roth laughed. "Still with the same wit and charm as ever, I see," he said. "Believe it or not, I am in fact one of the Federation's finest minds."

With a tragically horrified expression, Q said, "I had no idea things had gotten so bad."

"Oh, ha," Roth said. "Truly, think about it." He spoke as if reciting to a concert hall. "Bright Jove, radiant as a thousand moons, pales next to the blaze of the sun."

"Oh, nicely said."

In a voice pitched for Vulcan ears only, Tris said, "Correct me if I'm wrong, but are those two flirting, or what?"

"Or what passes for it," T'Laren murmured back.

"After all, consider who I had for a teacher," Roth was saying.

"You have a point." Q turned to the other three. "I taught Harry everything he knows."

"It's true," Roth nodded. He glanced sideways at Q. "Now, if only he would let me teach him everything _I_ know..."

"Can I break up this mutual admiration society here?" Dhawan asked, at exactly the wrong point-- T'Laren would have loved to see how Q would respond to such a blatantly flirtatious overture.

"I don't see why," Q said. "_I'm_ having fun."

"You can stand here and trade double entendres with Harry all night for all I care. But the captain would like to meet you at some point."

"Oh, the mysterious Captain Okita finally deigns to grace me with his presence?"

"Now, Q, let's try not to be a complete ass, shall we?" Roth said. "Though admittedly you do it so well."

Q shrugged. "When one has a talent as well-developed as mine, it seems a shame to waste it."

"Use it on someone other than Commander Dhawan, then. She's been known to pull knives on Klingons."

"Really." Q turned to Dhawan. "Should I be frightened?"

Dhawan smiled ferally. "You're not a Klingon." She let a beat pass. "I wouldn't waste a knife on you."

"I think a good kick in the butt would do the job, myself," Tris said. "If you think it's necessary, Shara, I hereby volunteer."

"You think I can't fight my own battles, Tris?" Dhawan asked cheerfully.

"Hardly. I think Derek would have a fit if a human officer attacked one of the guests, though. Whereas I'm a crazy Bajoran, so I can get away with it. Besides, it's always best to pick on someone your own size."

T'Laren blinked. That had to be another Tris-ism. "Tris, what does size have to do with it? Commander Dhawan is much smaller than Q."

From Tris's expression, she realized she had just played straight woman for him again. "Exactly. It'd be a terribly unfair fight. Everyone knows a short vicious woman can kick a tall man's butt from here to Romulus, and if he tries to defend himself physically everyone jumps on him for hitting a small woman. Whereas _I_ can kick Q's butt from here to Romulus, and no one would criticize him for trying to fight back." He beamed at Q. "See, this is Starfleet. It's very important for us to fight fair."

"Are you both truly complete psychopathic savages, or is this an act you're putting on for my benefit?" Q asked.

"In Tris's case it's an act," T'Laren said. "He may consider a beating to be highly therapeutic for you, but he won't actually administer one without a prescription. I would watch Commander Dhawan if I were you, however. She seems formidable."

"Thank you," Dhawan said. She turned to Q. "I don't want you on my ship."

"The very soul of diplomacy. I can see why they got a Vulcan child to do your job."

"I don't believe in beating around the bush. I don't want _any_ of you on my ship. I'm perfectly capable of analyzing the singularity myself, and I don't need every physicist in the Federation second-guessing me. And I consider you personally to be highly overrated."

"Really."

"Yes, really. If you're so brilliant, if you're bending over backwards to help out us mere mortals, why are we still limited to warp? Why haven't you given us the secret of teleportation, or something?"

"Because," Q said, as if talking to a very small child, "the way I know how to teleport is to travel to the Q Continuum, then back out to the mundane universe. And I really don't think that sending a pack of teleporting savages to go romping through my old hometown will endear me any to the folks sitting on my parole board. Not to mention that you'd consume the power of an entire sun every time you did it, and the stress of channeling such energy would derange your petty little minds. Does the name Gary Mitchell ring a bell?"

It didn't, actually. It didn't seem to enlighten Dhawan, either. "It was an example, Q. Surely a superior being like yourself can think of _something_ we mere mortals are capable of."

"Certainly. But being capable of something and being ready to do it are two entirely different things. As I understand it, human children are capable of reproducing themselves when they're twelve. No one suggests it would be a good idea for them to do so, however. If I gave you a dramatic advance in theoretical understanding, enough to support something like, oh, say, a working transwarp drive, it would disrupt the balance of power in your little area of the galaxy. I trust the Federation more than the Romulans or Cardassians; I do _not_, however, trust them with dramatic increases of power. And I find it very interesting that you, a member of an organization whose Prime Directive is not to contaminate less advanced cultures with technology they're not ready for, should think less of a member of a more advanced culture for holding back what he knows."

"He's got you, Shara," Tris said. "Of course, I always thought the Prime Directive was arrogant and patronizing, myself."

"No problem," Roth said. "Q will cheerily admit to being arrogant and patronizing, I'm sure."

T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "Harry, if this is how you treat people you like, I'd hate to see your behavior toward one you hated."

"I never said I _liked_ Q, Doctor. I said I could tolerate him."

"You love me, Harry. Admit it. You were the secret admirer sending the boxes of chocolate to my room."

"Couldn't have been. Maybe that was Nian, trying to cheer you up. I send my secret admirees things like black silk briefs." Roth paused a second, as if thinking. "You suppose it could have been Amy?"

Q grimaced. "Oh, _please_."

A man in an antigrav-chair floated up behind Q. He was a stick figure, skin and bones, limply lolling in the chair; his head was connected to the chair by implants at his temples, which touched against two bars coming out from the chair. The contraption seemed to be all that was holding his head in place. "I see you're still winning friends and influencing people," his chair said in the same kind of slightly flat voice the subvocalizer Q had used during his hospitalization produced. It would have sounded normal at first if T'Laren hadn't known it to be coming from a chair.

Q turned. "Daedalus!" he exclaimed. "What a delight! Though I must admit it doesn't come as a surprise-- I saw your name on the guest list."

"I saw yours as well," the chair said for the man in it. "I don't know why I didn't cancel then."

"Because you knew this conference would be condemned to utter dullness without me, and you wished to provide me moral support in my ambition to liven it up."

"I suppose that must have been it." The man's head turned slightly, eyes focusing on Q. In contrast to the debilitated state of the rest of him, his eyes were shockingly bright. "You look terrible, you know that?"

"I'm _wounded_. I spent three hours in front of a mirror trying to control the damage and you see through me immediately."

"I always saw through you, Lucy. It's the curse of being the greatest mind humanity currently has."

"Who is this, Q?" T'Laren asked.

Dhawan and Roth looked at her as if she had confessed she really hadn't known that stars weren't painted on the sky. "The estimable Dr. Peter Markow, intrepid explorer into regions where no man has gone before and angels fear to tread," Q said. He pronounced the name Markov; T'Laren remembered the spelling from the conference guest list. "And Daedalus, this is my charming Vulcan companion, T'Ex."

"It must be a private joke," Tris said.

"Not private enough," T'Laren murmured.

"I'm pleased to meet you, T'Ex," Markow said. From the flatness in the artificial voice and the lack of expression in his slack face, it was impossible to tell if he knew that T'Ex wasn't her name. "I'd be more pleased if I knew who the hell you were, though. I can't imagine Lucy getting a woman into bed, so what are you, his bodyguard?"

"Among other things," T'Laren said.

"Dr. T'Laren is Q's psychiatrist," Dhawan said.

"Therapist, actually. I haven't got a psychiatric license." T'Laren concealed her annoyance at Dhawan. "Dr. Markow, why do you call Q 'Lucy'?"

"Aren't you halfway curious as to why he calls me Daedalus?"

"Yes, but I'm more curious about Lucy."

"Short for Lucifer," Markow explained. "And Q screwed it up. It should have been Icarus."

"It should have been. Then I could have called you Icky, and we would _really_ have bewildered people."

Roth turned to T'Laren. "Dr. Markow's one of the greatest minds in Federation physics. When we were working against the Borg, he and Q worked together quite a bit, moreso than many of us. I'm afraid we all got a little strange when we were working against the Borg."

"I can imagine."

"Well, it was good to talk to you again, Dr. Markow," Dhawan said. "I've got to go keep Morakh and Milarca from killing each other."

"Oh, Morakh! My favorite bonebrain. I'd forgotten he was here," Q said. "Daedalus, do you mind terribly if I go over and bother him?"

"Of course I mind. I want to talk to you about this damned singularity, not watch you get smeared into pulp."

"No need to be afraid of Morakh. For all the Klingon bluster, he's really a big pussycat. A very big, very ugly pussycat."

"I'm not worried about Morakh. I'm worried about Dhawan."

Tris nodded. "He's right. You're probably beneath Morakh's notice. --In the sense of physical combat, of course."

"I personally think it's a side effect of time travel," Markow said.

The non sequitur threw T'Laren for a moment, but not Roth. "What makes you say that, Dr. Markow?" he asked.

"Stop with the Dr. Markows, Roth, you're going to make me feel old. I say that because if you look at the pattern formed by the fifth-dimensional interstitial matrices--"

"Oh, _please_, Daedalus. You're supposed to be a bright man, for a human."

Tris turned to T'Laren as the three physics experts descended into technobabble. "I suppose that's our cue to either leave or let our eyes politely glaze over and murmur like we know what they're talking about," he said.

"I really should stay and keep Q out of trouble."

"You're not doing too well so far."

"I can't exactly gag him."

"I don't know. I'd consider it if he were my patient."

"No, you wouldn't. You wouldn't actually kick him in the posterior either if he were your patient. Admit it, Tris."

"I suppose you're right-- which is why I'm glad he's not my patient." The two of them had started to walk away from the knot of arguing scientists. "I'm warning you, T'Laren, either he keeps himself under control or he _is_ going to get a punch in the face, either from me or Shahrazad. It's our job-- not to mention Sovaz's-- to keep this madhouse under control. We've got all these volatile, obnoxious, arrogant assholes aboard, and adding Q to the mix was _maybe_ not the most brilliant idea anyone had. I'm not going to interfere between you and your patient, but if he gets too disruptive, his ass is grass and I'm a terraformer. You understand?"

"You've gotten much better at the colorful Terran metaphors," T'Laren said.

"Yes, haven't I? It comes from being Bajoran. We already swear better than anyone else in the known universe."

"I had forgotten."

"Yeah." He snagged some hors d'oeuvres from a tray. "Want some?"

"I'll take a rice ball."

"Gone veggie again?" Tris shook his head. "I don't care what Starfleet says about tolerance for other races' customs, I _know_ humanoids weren't intended to be vegetarians."

"Meat on Vulcan is bad for one; it's much richer in heavy metals than our plant life is."

"You're not on Vulcan."

T'Laren shrugged slightly. "You're not on Bajor. You still wear that earring."

"That's different."

"I don't see how."

He sighed. "Do you really want to have a stupid argument right now?"

T'Laren shook her head. "I've had enough of them lately."

Tris nodded. "I figured." He took a deep breath. "So. How've you been?"

She studied him intently. This was another ploy to get her to talk about it, she was sure. With Tris, it was best to be blunt. "Tris, I really don't want to talk about it, all right? The last few years have been... very bad. I just... would rather not speak of them. Not yet."

"All right."

"But I'll ask how you've been, if you're willing to tell me."

"Sure I'm willing... you've heard the big news, haven't you? You must have, unless you were in a monastery the past year or so."

"The big news?"

"The Occupation's over. The Cardassians packed up and went home. And a Starfleet officer found out that the Celestial Temple of the Prophets is really a stable wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant, so Bajor's actually of interest to someone. We've got a Provisional Government that _may_ even last another three months before degenerating into chaos. You must have heard."

"Yes, of course. To be honest, Tris, I'd forgotten for a moment that Bajor was still occupied when I last spoke to you. It seems like... a much shorter time ago than it actually was." She grew pensive. "I was occupied with personal problems when I first heard about it, but once the significance sank in, I remember wondering if you would choose to go home."

"I thought about it." He shrugged. "I think I can do more good here."

He lied well to total strangers. To friends, though, his inclination was to be honest when possible, and as a result he was transparent to one who knew him well. "If you say so," T'Laren said evenly, indicating her disbelief by a slightly raised eyebrow.

Tris smiled wryly. "You still know how to see through my bullshit, I can tell." He looked away. "I'm... not sure how well I'd be received at home. They published my name as one of the 'Unsung Heroes of the Resistance' or some crap like that, but to most people I probably still look like a suck-up to the Cardassians." He shook his head. "Bajor's got too much history. I'm not interested in history. I don't like my history much-- I don't want to be the man I was on Bajor. And if I go back, that's what I'll be." He turned back to her. "Besides, while there's Bajorans in Starfleet, they all went through the Academy and got the edges polished off. Counselors can serve with Starfleet without being Starfleet officers themselves, so I can be out here and prove that Bajorans aren't all crazy terrorists. So in a sense, I _do_ actually think I'm more use here."

"And you know aliens better than your own kind, now?" she asked softly.

"A little, yeah. I'm not as alienated-- ooh, bad pun, I didn't mean it-- as you are-- or were; you seem to be pretty comfortable in a Vulcan skin now. Except, of course, that real Vulcans don't get so upset with people who didn't do anything to them that they turn specifically and viciously cold to their loved ones."

"Real Vulcans do indeed," she said, refusing to rise to the bait. "Someone has been telling you tales about real Vulcans, I suspect."

"That would be Sovaz." His eyes wandered over to where she stood in a conversational knot, eagerly interrogating a Tellarite and a human about some arcane concept of physics. "She's a great kid, you know."

"You are not thinking what I suspect you're thinking."

"Of _course_ not." His voice dripped disgust. "What do you think I am, a child molester? Give her ten years and maybe."

T'Laren shrugged. "I'm sorry if I've offended you, but Sovaz is twenty-seven. Most humanoids would consider her fair game."

"Sovaz is incredibly immature, even for a Vulcan. And I know about Vulcans being late bloomers." He looked at her. "It's because you're vegetarians," he said solemnly. "Look at you. You ate meat on Earth and you told me _you_ got started when you were fifteen. Most Vulcans don't until their late twenties, isn't that what you told me? I personally think we should start a charity. Feed the starving Vulcans some protein. It'll do wonders for your sex lives."

"Early blooming is hardly an advantage on Vulcan; besides, I 'got started' because I was frightened, and you know me. Show me something I'm afraid of, and I'll dive headlong into it--"

"Like maybe dealing with your little sister?"

T'Laren shook her head. "Cruel, Tris."

"But true."

She changed the subject. "How long have you been counselor on the _Yamato_?"

"I got posted here as backup counselor, oh, maybe nine months ago. Then Counselor Seligman retired to teach the natives of Penu about learned optimism, about six months ago, so I ended up as main counselor on a Galaxy-class starship. Pretty impressive for a boy from Bajor, huh?"

"I'd thought you were going into psy-ops."

"Too much like what I did before. I wanted something completely different." He looked at her. "What about you?"

"You're astonishingly persistent, did you know?"

"It's one of my charms."

At that point a snatch of conversation caught her attention. "Excuse me." She headed back over to Q, quickly.

Q was facing Dr. Morakh, smirking slightly. Morakh's expression was unreadable, masked under an impassive Klingon scowl.

"Oh, you can admit it, we're all friends here," Q was saying. "For all your education and your posturing at being a rational being, you _really_ would rather be ripping my head off than debating with me. Go ahead, confess. You Klingons are simply unfit for civilization."

"I doubt there are very many sentient beings you have ever met in your life who would not wish to rip your head off," Morakh retorted.

"That depends on how you define 'sentient'."

Morakh ignored that. "The distinction you are failing to make is that a civilized being would _not_ rip your head off. Despite provocation. In fact, a civilized being, such as myself, would not _want_ to."

"Oh really?" Q raised any eyebrow. "And here I thought you were supposed to enjoy that sort of thing. The joys of mayhem. Glorious battle and all that."

"If I attacked you, it would not be a battle," Morakh said. "It would simply be a slaughter."

"Same thing."

T'Laren interposed herself between the two. "I'm afraid I couldn't permit that," she said evenly.

Morakh scowled at her. "I had heard Vulcans were pacifists." He made it sound like a curse.

"We were forced to be," T'Laren said calmly. "We were far too good at war."

For several seconds they stared one another down. Then Morakh broke the stare, laughing. "I like you," he said. "You have courage. Be assured I won't attack your charge, T'Laren." He gazed at Q as if examining a herd animal. "It would be beneath my dignity to assault such a weakling."

"Or perhaps you're just afraid of Starfleet," Q said snidely.

Morakh looked at him again. "I have heard you tried to kill yourself," he said. "If you are too much of a coward to do the job properly, that is your problem. I will not be provoked into doing it for you."

He turned away. Q stared after him for several seconds, a look of astonishment on his face.

"Why did you provoke him like that?" T'Laren asked sharply.

Q shrugged. "To see what he'd do." He smiled. "Who'd have thought it? There actually _is_ a brain under that craggy forehead. I'm impressed."

"I'm not," Markow said. "You're going to get yourself killed one of these days, Lucy."

"What can I say? Live dangerously, that's my motto."

"Get a new motto, then."

"I don't think he was in much danger, Peter," Roth said, giving the name the self-conscious edge of a man trying deliberately to use a first name. "I've dealt with Morakh before. He's really quite a calm fellow, for a Klingon."

A small albino woman with oversized golden eyes approached the small group. Her hair was short, a chin-length pageboy cut that curled under at the bottom, and she wore a tight blue satin bodysuit that left very little to the imagination. T'Laren saw Tris' eyes widen slightly in appreciation. She glanced back at Q, who nodded at the newcomer. "Dr. What's-your-name. A pleasure to see you again."

"I'm glad to see you made it to the conference, Q," the woman said. Her voice was soft but firm. "Rumor had you dead of acid poisoning."

"Well. The rumors of my death--"

"-- were greatly cliched," Markow said. "Try an original one."

"Dr. Markow, Dr. Roth, would it disturb you if I requested a few moments of Q's time? My researches have turned up an interesting question that I believe he's best equipped to answer, if he's willing."

"Of course not," Roth said. "We'd no intention of utterly monopolizing him."

"An interesting question regarding the singularity? Or some other aspect of physics?" Q asked.

"As regards history, actually. A hobby of mine."

Q rolled his eyes. "How typically Laon'l." He turned to T'Laren. "Her people are positively obsessive about their own history. I can't imagine why. A more tedious history would be difficult to come up with."

"There were intriguing spots," the woman said. She nodded at T'Laren. "I have heard you are an associate of Q's? Dr. T'Laren?"

The phrasing left it ambiguous as to whether the woman knew T'Laren was not a fellow physicist, but T'Laren didn't feel the need to explain her relationship with Q again. "Yes."

"I am Professor Miari Elejani Baíi of New Laon." The woman clasped her fists together between her breasts and then spread her palms out toward T'Laren in what was obviously a ritual greeting. "I must warn you that I am an empath."

In other words, she had noted the relaxed condition of T'Laren's mental shielding, and thought T'Laren should know that she could read T'Laren's emotions through it. "Thank you for warning me," T'Laren said, but didn't strengthen her shields-- she was perfectly comfortable at the moment. She recognized the species now. Laon'l were a very recent addition to the Federation, powerfully empathic relatives of the Scamarans, who had been Federation members for some time and had very slight empathic gifts. Laon'l mindhealers were supposed to match Betazoids for their skills in repairing damaged psyches. But Laon'l, unlike their Scamaran cousins, were supposed to be physically fragile and emotionally reclusive, preferring to stay on their own world. T'Laren had never met one.

Elejani Baíi turned back to Q, who picked up his drink and sipped at it serenely. "Since the Reunification, Laon'l scholars have been fascinated by the circumstances of our separation from the Scamarans," she said. "There has been a revitalization of interest in the question of Emaroth."

"No doubt your Scamaran cousins think you're wasting time."

"Scamarans are people of action. We Laon'l have undertaken only one major action in our history. Of course you are familiar with our history?"

"Fairly conversant," Q said.

"I'm not," Markow said.

T'Laren thought she detected slight irritation in Elejani Baíi's face. No doubt she really wanted to pose her question to Q, not to explain herself to Markow. But Markow was far too respected in the scientific community, even by people who thought his theories were ridiculous, for her to ignore him. "Then I shall tell the whole story, so that we all understand and can converse," Elejani Baíi said-- it sounded like a ritual phrase.

"How about you just ask me the question, and if Daedalus really wants to hear it, you can tell him the whole thing later," Q suggested.

"The question concerns Daishenéon Emaroth."

"Why does that not surprise me?"

"Who?" Markow asked. "Ignore Lucy, he's being an ass. I want to hear this."

Q sighed. "Oh, go on, Dr. Elejani," he said. "Heavens forfend that the great Peter Markow should misunderstand a single minute of a conversation not aimed at him."

"If it is acceptable," Elejani Baíi said. She turned to face Markow and Roth. "My people are a very old race, older far than humanity. We had a civilization on our homeworld of Old Laon for ten thousand years, with a technology based primarily on biogenetics and our empathic powers. But we had never left our world. We held no interest in space. In fact, in our mythos, the sky was what you might call Hell-- the source of metaphysic dangers to the soul, the home of demons and the land of the tormented dead. We feared that when we looked to the stars, the stars might suck out our souls. We were, in fact, the only race I've ever heard of who developed a high level of technology without so much as putting up a satellite."

"They were, in fact, the most _boring_ people you've ever heard of," Q said. "No ambition, no drive to learn, no need to explore. They explored their own pathetic little world, covered it with their holistic and oh-so-terribly harmonious cities, and then sat and analyzed their own navels for ten thousand years."

"You speak as if you were there," Elejani Baíi said.

"I was."

"Good, then you _will_ be able to answer my question." She turned back to the others. "Three thousand years ago, we were... confronted with a being who called herself Emaroth. She claimed to come from space, and so we dubbed her a demon-- a term that seemed more and more accurate as the years went by. Emaroth was a creature of immense power, and to us it seemed great malevolence. She informed us-- in terms not unlike those that Q just used-- that we had wasted our potential, squandered the promise of our sentience and the bounty of our world, and that therefore she was taking possession of our planet. Every year, she would extract a tithe of 1,000 of our best and brightest, and carry them off to Hell."

"And you believed this?" Markow asked. "That she was taking them to Hell?"

"Oh, yes," Elejani Baíi said calmly. "You must understand that we were not a superstitious people-- we rarely spoke of things like Hell and demons. But I have watched the records we made at the time, and it is hard to see how a thinking being could _not_ believe. Emaroth could-- and did-- level buildings with a gesture, make people vanish and reappear, raise the dead or kill with a thought. We called her Daishenéon-- a term that's something of a pun; it can mean either Great Lady, Empress, or Great Demon. The word Emaroth itself was intrinsically meaningless but seemed to be related to our words for 'judge' and 'challenger'." She sipped at a drink Roth handed her. "Also it may help to understand that just as humanity has a predisposition toward patriarchy, we Laon'l have a predisposition toward matriarchy. Our sexes were equal under the law, but we were more likely to perceive a woman as an authority figure, just as you are more likely to see authority in a male." She cast a sidewise glance at Q, who had a studiedly bland expression.

"We did whatever we could to stop Emaroth. We shot at her, poisoned her, blew up our own buildings around her. She merely laughed-- she didn't even exact retribution for the attempts, which terrified us even more. Our best efforts were completely beneath her. Our most powerful psis united in an attempt to read her mind. Their brains were burnt out by the effort, and Emaroth implied that she hadn't even consciously assaulted them-- according to her, she was simply too advanced a form of life for the comprehension of our limited brains."

"Sounds like you'd get along with her," Markow said to Q.

"Undoubtedly."

"Some of us tried desperately to propitiate her, reinstituting the ancient custom of child sacrifice. Emaroth resurrected the children and opened the ground beneath the sacrificers, dropping them into the core of Old Laon, because she was annoyed by the attempt. She insisted that there was nothing we could do to stop her, that so long as we lived on Old Laon she would take her claim of 1,000 every year.

"And somehow that sparked an idea. Emaroth had told us that the stars we feared were suns like ours, that harbored worlds like ours. Space itself might be hellish, but if we could cross through it to a new world... it was our _world_ and the people on it Emaroth had laid claim to. She made that very clear. Somehow, after ten thousand years of fearing the stars, we became desperate enough to try to flee to them.

"It took three generations of feverish work for us to develop a ship. The best we managed was impulse drive; our ships would be generation ships, but once we were free of our world we would be free of Emaroth, whether we had found a new world yet or no."

"Only three generations?" T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "I've never heard of a species that developed impulse drive that quickly without some outside help."

"You must understand the impetus. All the most intelligent of our kind were going into physics. People who might have gone into biochemistry or psychology were driven by the fear that Emaroth would take them as part of her tithe. Our leaders, who fancied themselves the best and brightest of Laon, feared the same, and so all our world's resources were being diverted toward escape." She sipped again at her drink. "Finally it came time. We persuaded all but six million of our people to leave in the generation ships; those six million were either too stubborn to go, or feared that Emaroth was tricking us into space where she could take us all, or suspected that Emaroth would never get around to them or their families with all the other people left behind to choose from. So we parted from our remaining people, and left our world for the 100-year-journey to New Laon.

"50 years away from Old Laon, we saw our sun go nova. Old Laon and all the people we left behind, all our history, all our ruins, were no more than elemental particles. And we believed Emaroth had done it out of malice or rage, that we'd escaped her grasp, and we cursed her name for 3,000 years. And after we reached our new world, we once more averted our eyes from the stars.

"Fifteen years ago, we were contacted by the Federation. We discovered that those taken in Emaroth's tithe had been transported to a harsh, deadly world, that they had fought and finally tamed-- the world they called Scamara. Our lost brethren had also developed space flight, built colonies, and joined the Federation. They had technology we had only dreamed of, and access to the bounties of a hundred worlds. They persuaded us that space was not inhabited by devils, and we consented to join the Federation, overjoyed by our reunion with them.

"And so the question of Emaroth has been reopened-- who she was, what her motives were, how she did the things she did. Most of my people still believe Emaroth to be malevolent-- that she chased us from our world out of petty malice. And yet recently we have used warp drive to intercept the light from Old Laon, from before the nova, and we've discovered that there was evidence of the impending nova hundreds of years before Emaroth's arrival. So I have wondered if perhaps Emaroth did not save our world; that, with full consciousness of the upcoming nova, she harried our people into developing the tools to save ourselves. If one takes the premise that Emaroth truly believed that we had squandered our potential, then her actions with the Scamarans make sense-- by being forced to live on a harsh and unforgiving world, the Scamarans were forced to become problem solvers and explorers, and ended up achieving space flight on their own, at a much higher level than we did."

"Which is why the Scamarans are so much more interesting than you," Q said.

"Exactly." Elejani Baíi turned to Q. "When I heard of _you_, and your race, I was struck by the similarities between your kind and Emaroth. A race of powerful beings that arbitrarily pronounce judgment on less advanced races, that perform malevolent acts that are in the long run beneficial-- such as your warning humanity about the dangers of the Borg..."

Q shrugged. "There are a lot of near-omnipotent races out there. She could have been a Douwd. Or a Metraskan. Or an Organian, though probably not."

"But that is what I have wanted for some time to ask you. You should know, one way or another. Was Emaroth one of your people? And if she was, was she acting out of sheer malevolence, as many of my kind believe, or was she trying to save us?"

"What do _you_ think?" Q asked, in his best I'm-certainly-not-going-to-give-everything-away voice.

Elejani Baíi smiled. "I think that I am an empath," she said. "And I think that for all the control you have of your face, you have very little control over what an empath may sense of your emotions. And therefore I think that you have just answered both of my questions-- Daishenéon."

As Q's eyes widened, Elejani Baíi suddenly reached up and put her arms around his neck, pulling herself up. T'Laren tensed, prepared to grab Elejani Baíi if necessary, but the Laon'l woman merely kissed Q on the cheek and released him. "Few of my people would appreciate what you've done for us," she said. "But I understand. I give you the gratitude of all my people."

She turned away and walked off into the crowd before anyone could say anything. Finally, Markow said, "Well?"

"Well what?" Q asked, still staring after Elejani Baíi as if she'd just revealed that she was his long-lost mother.

"Well, was she right? Did you save her people?"

Q turned to Markow and smiled evilly. "_She_ thinks so," he said. "And who am I to turn down a potential ally? Even perhaps a deluded one?"

Roth laughed. "You utter dog. You tricked her?"

Q shrugged, an innocent expression on his face. "What she wants to believe isn't any concern of mine, is it?"

T'Laren studied him, unconvinced. She had more experience reading Q's expressions than the others here, she suspected. And when Elejani Baíi had called him Daishenéon, he'd had the same expression he got when T'Laren surprised him by figuring out something he'd hidden from her. It struck her as curious, if it were true-- not the idea that it was true; she saw nothing inconsistent between Elejani Baíi's story and Q's personality. He had never given her any kind of detail on the things he'd done in his past life, and none of the incidents mentioned in his records were instances of him helping a race out-- but then, this story hardly described an unambiguous situation in that regard, either. What would the Scamarans do to Q if they decided that he was the being who had exiled them from their original home? Even if Q had done it to save them from their star going nova, they might demand retribution-- after all, someone with Q's powers _could_ simply have prevented the star from going nova, or could have transported them to a kind world like their own, not a hellhole that killed thousands before they finally tamed it. It was entirely possible that some of the ones who'd come looking for Q had benefited from his actions in some roundabout way-- T'Laren had no trouble reconciling that with what she knew of him.

But why, if it were true, would he hide it from Roth and Markow? Everyone knew Q had committed atrocities. Why wasn't he eager to let people know that he had done good deeds as well? She thought she knew why he didn't go about protesting that he'd done wonderful things, but why, when someone had stood up and described a good deed he'd done, did he lie and imply he hadn't done it? Was he getting some emotional benefit out of being perceived as entirely villainous? If so, she'd have to work on that with him-- it would be very difficult to get him to make friends if he wanted everyone to think of him as the bad guy.

"Well, that was fun," Tris murmured. "This kind of thing happen often?"

"I'm not sure," T'Laren murmured back. "I've never seen it before, but I'm afraid that proves little."

At this point a middle-aged Japanese man with short-cropped, solid gray hair approached. From a glance at the pips on his dress uniform, T'Laren realized he had to be Captain Okita.

Q seemed to notice him at the same time. "Ah, the mysterious Captain Okita," he said. "I'm so glad you've finally come to say hello."

Okita smiled genially. T'Laren had a definite feeling that nothing whatsoever would appear to offend this man unless he chose to let it. He nodded at the three scientists. "Dr. Markow. Q. It's an honor to have individuals of your distinction aboard _Yamato_," he said, still smiling. "And Dr. Roth, I believe we met a few days ago? How are you enjoying your stay thus far?"

"Well, I can't say it's been boring," Roth said, grinning.

"I suppose a little honor must go a very long way," Q said to Markow.

"Don't be an ass, Lucy."

"Ah, the day-to-day running of a starship is a time-consuming business," Okita said. "One can't allow as much time for pleasure as one would hope." He turned to T'Laren. "Dr. T'Laren. So glad to see you well. Your young sister Sovaz is shaping up into a fine officer."

"She honors her family," T'Laren said. "But I'm afraid that family is no longer mine, Captain. Sovaz is no longer my sister."

"It's a shame to hear that. I'd be proud to have her as a sister, myself."

"Do they teach you that in command school at the Academy?" Q asked. "Or is it a little trick you've picked up along the way?"

Okita turned back to him, still smiling. "Teach what?"

"How to insult people while sounding as if you're complimenting them. It's a neat trick, wherever you learned it."

Markow rolled his eyes, and Roth pressed a hand to his forehead. Okita's smile broadened slightly. "I've been told you take pride in being difficult, Mr. Q," he said.

"A scurrilous rumor."

"I'm sure it is." He nodded at all five of them. "It's been pleasant talking to you, but duty calls, I'm afraid." He left.

"Well, that was a rather astonishing fellow," Roth said.

"He does that," Tris said. "It's his 'man of mystery' act. Ride into town, greet the diplomats warmly, then ride off into the sunset again."

"He doesn't sound very fun at parties," Q said.

"As if you ever get invited to parties," Markow said.

"I get invited to all the best ones."

"Define best."

"The ones I'm at, of course."

"Anyway," Tris said to T'Laren, ignoring the interplay between the physicists. "I'm kind of supposed to circulate. If you feel like talking, look me up after the reception."

"Of course."

* * *

T'Laren spent the rest of the reception watching Q. There were no more near-disasters as there had been with Morakh; he spent most of the time trading witticisms and technobabble with Roth and Markow, occasionally breaking stride to chat with someone else who showed up but making no attempt to circulate. The three of them seemed perfectly content to be a monobloc, indivisible by the conversational sorties of others.

It grew late. The reception started to fray, bleeding off people to their rooms for the night, and T'Laren could see that Q was tiring. When she suggested to him that he might wish to leave, however, he laughed her off. Finally Markow said, rather abruptly, "I'm going to bed. Goodbye."

"You can't leave _now_, Daedalus," Q protested. His tone was light and joking, but there was a faint desperate edge to it. "The night is still young!"

"The night is, but I'm not. Just because you can go 72 hours on a catnap doesn't mean we mere mortals can duplicate the feat. Good night."

As his chair floated off, Roth said somewhat apologetically, "Perhaps we should both get some rest. The conference starts at 1100 tomorrow, you know."

"Oh, I scoff at sleep. Try spending three weeks in Li's sickbay and you'd be sick of sleeping too."

"Agreed," Roth said, grinning. "But I'm beginning to think the caterers would like for us to get out of here..."

"Well, perhaps we should find a more congenial location. T'Laren! You know a bit about starships. Where would you suggest we go?"

"Why not to our rooms?" T'Laren suggested. She was tiring herself, and could see that Q was exhausting himself-- his voice was a little too manic, his movements suggestive of punchiness, his laughter a bit shrill.

Q blinked at her. "T'Laren. Are you seriously suggesting I take Roth to my _room?_" he asked. "What_ever_ would the neighbors think?"

"Probably the wrong thing... more's the pity," Harry said.

"I know, I know, one of the great tragedies of your life, right? I can't help it that I find your silly human sexual customs quite nauseating. It's nothing personal, you know."

"Well, you can't say something's nauseating if you haven't tried it, now can you?" Roth was definitely punchy, and maybe, T'Laren thought, a bit drunk-- synthehol rarely impaired one's motor coordination, but it was just as good as real alcohol at lowering inhibitions.

"I can. I know everything, remember?"

"You _used_ to know everything. You forgot most of it."

"I can still say something's nauseating," Q said lightly. "Besides. As flattering as I find the attention, I assure you, Harry, if you knew what I looked like under this monkey suit at the moment you would be considerably less interested."

"Oh, but I saw you in the hospital," Roth said. "I doubt you could look worse than that."

"And you're still interested?"

T'Laren wondered just how serious this was getting. Roth sounded almost as if he meant what hg was saying-- if he was drunk, he probably _did_ mean what he was saying-- but did Q know that? Or care? "Most certainly," Harry said/

"Well, there you have it. I couldn't possibly be seen in the company of a man with such terrible taste. Harry, I'm ashamed of you-- I thought you had _some_ sense of aesthetics." Q snapped his fingers. "I have, as usual, a brilliant notion. We can go to _your_ room, Harry, and we can take T'Laren along as a chaperone."

"We actually need a chaperone? Should I be encouraged?"

"I'm actually rather worn out," T'Laren said. "I would prefer to retire."

"But you still have a brilliant career ahead of you," Roth protested, grinning. T'Laren blinked.

"Forgive her, she's humor-impaired. It's a hereditary disease-- you get it from being born a Vulcan," Q said.

"I was just remarking that Lt. Roth must be more tired than I thought," T'Laren said. "Q, you need to get to bed. It's late."

"Oh, but I'm having fun."

"We could solve several problems at once if you took my suggestion," Roth said. "You could go to bed _and_ have fun. Everyone would be satisfied."

"I'm horrified, Harry, exactly how many glasses of synthwine do you think I _had?_"

"Not enough, obviously," Roth said mournfully.

"Q, kindly make up your mind. You can stay here and flirt with Lieutenant Roth if you wish, but _I_ am going to bed. Are you coming with me or not?"

"I think she just asked if you were going to bed with her," Roth said. "Should I be jealous?"

Q shook his head sadly. "To think how advanced the human race might be if they didn't devote 90% of their thinking processes to the sordid pursuit of sexual encounters. You know, Harry, if I weren't such a tolerant and forbearing individual I might have become quite disgusted by now."

"Well, either that or you're more human than you thought."

"Please don't insult me like that again."

"Good night, Q," T'Laren said.

"Good _night_, T'Laren! Sleep tight!" Q caroled. "So long, farewell, _auf wiedersehen_, good night!"

T'Laren raised an eyebrow to herself as she headed for her quarters. Q was considerably less naive now than he had been during the incident with Amy Frasier-- she had to assume that he knew what he was doing.

* * *

She had barely gotten out of her clothes and makeup when he showed up back at the room, though. He had an origami bird, apparently made out of a napkin, in one hand, and was tossing it up and catching it again, whistling. T'Laren came out in her nightgown and bathrobe. "You seem cheerful."

"I hadn't noticed." Q plopped himself down in front of a console. "Computer, display gravitometric map of the singularity." His voice was hoarse and rasping, and even through his makeup he looked pale and drawn.

A bizarrely warped image flashed into existence over the console. "Q, you're exhausted. You should go to sleep."

"Nonsense. I'm enjoying myself far too much to sleep. Computer, rotate image by 90 degrees."

"You're really frightened of going to sleep, aren't you?" T'Laren pulled up a chair and sat down near him.

Q glared at her. "_Frightened? _Why would I be frightened of going to _sleep? _I simply don't _want_ to, T'Laren, and _please_ stop making mountains out of molehills, will you?"

"You're afraid of having nightmares. And perhaps you're afraid that when you wake up, you won't be in as good a mood."

He smiled wryly. "The odds of me being in anything that remotely resembles a good mood when I wake up tomorrow are practically infinitesimal. I admit it. Why should I spoil a wonderful night by sleeping through it?"

"Because you will feel terrible in the morning?"

"It hardly makes a difference if I go to bed now or in an hour or don't go to bed at all, I'll feel terrible in the morning. So it really doesn't make much of a difference at all, does it now?"

"I suppose not." She got up and went to the room's replicator. "Would you like a hot chocolate?"

"I'd like a cold chocolate. Heavy on the caffeine. In fact, make it a mocha."

T'Laren shrugged and ordered a hot chocolate and a cold mocha. He glanced up in surprise as she handed it to him. "You're actually giving me what I asked for?"

"I don't think you're going to be deliberately self-destructive again for some time, if ever. And if you want to abuse your health..." She shrugged. "You're in sufficiently good shape now to tolerate a few nights without sleep. You won't like the results when you wake up, but it's your decision-- I'm not going to make an issue out of it."

"Hello? Exactly where did you come from and what have you done with T'Laren?"

Despite herself, she smiled slightly at that. _More tired than I thought! _"We're in a different environment now, Q. Of course I'm going to change tactics." She sat down again and sipped at her chocolate. "You enjoyed seeing those people again, didn't you?"

"Which ones?" He turned away from the display and faced her, showing a certain amount of interest in the conversation. She suspected that he would rather talk to her than try to make his tired brain make sense of the display.

"Roth and Markow, in particular. Actually, from the way the three of you behaved, I would have assumed them to be your friends. I thought you said you hardly knew Roth."

"I don't, really. But he's amusing to trade conversational banter with."

"And amusing to flirt with as well?"

Q choked on his mocha. He put the glass down, an expression of mingled embarrassment, outrage, and amusement on his face. "I was _not_ flirting with him!" The amusement took the upper hand for a moment, his face twitching into a slight smile. "_He_ was flirting."

"And what were you doing, then?" T'Laren asked, amused herself.

"Responding, of course." The slight smile turned into a brief grin.

"That's generally referred to as flirting where I come from."

"Well, you're all barbarians in Texas."

T'Laren sipped at the drink again. "Seriously. Given what you've told me about your troubles with human sexuality, does that bother you?"

"What, that he flirts? Harry does that with _everybody_."

"I have a feeling that it's a little more serious when he does it with you. In fact, I wasn't at all sure he was joking, before."

Q shrugged. "He was a bit drunk, I think," he said. "Harry enjoys handing himself over to the synthehol and acting silly."

"But you don't."

"I prefer acting silly without external aids, myself. But then, of course, I have a much bigger ego than Harry."

"Do you think there was any kind of element of seriousness in there at all?"

"Oh, almost certainly. At least an element. Possibly an entire row of the periodic table."

"Does that bother you?"

Q picked up his mocha and looked into it for a moment. "You know, it used to," he said. "After the, mm, incident with dearest Amy, I became very nervous about humans finding me attractive in that sense-- in an aesthetic sense, of course, I had always intended to be attractive, but I think I began to be unnerved by the relentless human confusion of the aesthetic with the sexual. For a while, the idea that people would even contemplate me in a sexual sense was rather disturbing. And disgusting, as well. But--" he shrugged-- "then I became too involved in my work against the Borg to care, and shortly after we'd finished that I was too depressed to care, not to mention that people had come to despise me too much to want me whatever I looked like... and finally I ended up looking terrible as well. So... actually I find it a little flattering. I've been so terribly unattractive for so long that I admit it's pleasant, to have someone find me otherwise... Oh, yes, I know that Harry probably would be as disgusted as everyone else is if he didn't have such a fetish for intellectuals, but then I've _always_ found appreciation of my intellect an enjoyable quality in someone else."

"I don't see why anyone would find you disgusting to look at, Q," T'Laren pointed out. "You spent several hours today on your appearance. It would be better if you were healthier and less thin, of course, but I don't see anything anyone could object to in your appearance tonight."

He shrugged. "No, maybe not tonight, but I'm not going to get quite this gussied up every night."

"Have you been aware of Roth's feelings before?"

"In a rather abstract sense, yes... He was never quite this blatant before, I'll grant. The closest he's come was the night after the Borg defeat... Starbase 56 more or less turned into a giant party. We'd suffered no casualties personally, you realize. And the Borg had been headed our way before the virus we developed finally took hold."

T'Laren frowned. "I was... indisposed at the time, but I'd heard that the Borg retreated from Wolf 359."

"They didn't retreat. They found another target. After they completed assimilating Langan and realized what humanity was up to, they realized that Starbase 56-- or more specifically, I-- was a much bigger threat to them than the armada at Wolf 359. That's really what kept the casualties down there. Oh, we improved shielding, and developed some rather unique methods for getting around their defenses, but that one ship had regenerated all the damage it had taken by the time it decided to 'retreat.' No, they were coming after me. And the rest of the scientists and tactical staff on the starbase." He stared off into the distance. "I really didn't think the virus would work before they got here-- we were quite far from Wolf 359, but Borg ships are fast when they want to be. Starfleet ships kept attacking, trying to slow them down-- the Borg brushed them off like, oh, not gnats, but maybe flies. Something that's a definite nuisance, and hard to hit, but a small insect nonetheless. I was quite convinced they'd get here before our virus stopped them." He grinned up at T'Laren. "I suggested to Anderson that she send me out to them. With a suicide capsule, of course, I had no intention of letting myself be assimilated. But Langan didn't know much about the total war effort-- he knew about me, everyone knew about me, and I thought the Borg would be satisfied to make sure I was dead, and would consider the rest of the base irrelevant if I wasn't on it. She told me I was being an idiot and there was no way Starfleet was going to sacrifice me after all I'd done. I told her _she_ was being the idiot... but it felt rather nice nonetheless."

"Q, this may perhaps be a very stupid question, but who was Langan?"

"Where were _you_ during the Borg War?"

_Dead. _"Indisposed, as I said."

"Ah. Stark raving nutty, you mean. Well... it became obvious to me very early on that there was no way I could make Starfleet into a technological match for the Borg without forever destroying the balance of power in this sector of the galaxy, which I suspected my own kind would not overly love me for. And which I suspected they wouldn't let me get away with doing in the first place. Besides, if Starfleet became a technological match for the Borg, the Borg would adapt to the technology they saw, and a century down the road, when the Federation didn't have me around to help anymore, they would come back stronger than ever. I realized we would have to exploit the natural weaknesses in the Borg... which are few and far between. So I came up with the notion of a computer virus, as it were. Something to completely destroy the operating system that links the Collective." Q shrugged. "I wasn't the one who implemented the idea, of course. I have made myself into a fair little programmer, but I'll never have, nor want, that sort of skill. Cyberneticists, scientists and engineers all over the Federation were involved in the project-- including Data and LaForge; I always found it amusing how LaForge would try to avoid talking directly to me whenever we ran conference calls. I was the one who gave them some insight into the theoretical underpinnings of the Collective, since it's something I've researched extensively... and in some ways I was responsible for the direct implementation." He looked down, as if ashamed somehow-- but why? Ashamed of what?

"How so?"

"You asked about Langan." Q looked directly at her. "It was obvious to me that if we were going to destroy the Borg with a computer virus, we needed a Borg to feed the virus into. As it happens, the Borg have a nasty habit of taking people from the cultures they plan to assimilate and making them into pseudo-Borg. Borg spokespersons, as it were; Borg with a remnant of personality, or rather a constructed personality, built on the ruins of what the person used to be. The Borg originally intended to use Jean-Luc for this purpose. My fault, in a sense-- he was familiar to them, they had encountered him and analyzed the records of his ship before. They knew him. So I warned him that the Borg were going to try to take him, and he was kept under intensive enough shielding during the critical period that the Borg went to Plan B. They grabbed a different starship captain. Robert Langan of the _Exeter_ became Locutus of Borg." Q looked at the table. "I never told Starfleet that the Borg would simply go to Plan B, you know. Because someone _had_ to be taken, to give us a link into the Borg. We wouldn't be able to infect a drone with the virus-- we needed someone who would be interfaced directly into the main stream of their processing, someone whose brain _we_ understood, who we would be able to sustain as we fed the virus directly into his brain. We would only have sufficient familiarity with a member of a Federation race. And besides, what I knew of the Borg's plan was based on their making a Locutus. If they were thwarted entirely, they would switch to a backup plan, one that I didn't know-- and while I could imagine such a plan, I could imagine far too many to figure out which they'd use. So. Someone needed to be Locutus. Someone needed to have his sanity and individuality destroyed forever." He looked up at T'Laren seriously. "It was my gift to Jean-Luc... both that I made sure he was spared that, and that I made sure he never knew I knew that someone else would have to go in his place. If Picard knew only that Langan had been taken... well, those are the fortunes of war. But if he'd known that I'd known that someone _would_ be taken, that someone would have to be... he would _know_ that I arranged for someone else to go in his place. And I never wanted that."

"Because you didn't want him to know you were ruthless enough to sacrifice someone to the Borg? Or compassionate enough to spare him?"

"Neither. Picard knew just how ruthless I can be. And I could care less if he thought I was compassionate. I didn't want him to know because it would hurt him to know. He would torture himself for years about how it should have been him. Every time he heard Langan's name mentioned it would be a knife in his heart. Jean-Luc wasn't the sort of man who could calmly accept that another should die in his place."

"You cared about him a great deal, didn't you?"

Q shrugged again. "When I was still Q, he amused me. Intrigued me. Infuriated me. Did I care? I... don't know. I tried to avoid caring about mortals, if you must know. They always die. I know one Q who's had her heart broken on the average of once a century because she can't help loving mortals, and they always die on her... and you have to let them die, they turn warped if you keep resurrecting them. But when I became mortal myself... I think I did care about him. He went out of his way in a lot of ways for me. For some time I resented the fact that he wouldn't let me stay on the _Enterprise_, of course, but... you know, originally Starfleet was toying with the idea of putting me on trial for crimes against humanity? Attempted murder, committing acts of war against the Federation, etc. Picard talked them out of it. The very person I committed those 'crimes' _against_. If it weren't for him, I might have died in a penal colony two and a half years ago."

"Starfleet would never have sentenced you to death, Q."

"No, but I couldn't have lasted more than six months at the outside in one." He stared into nothing. "I thought it was safe... because I was mortal myself, you see? I, too, would die. Probably before him. So I allowed myself to feel... gratitude. A certain amount of... warmth. He would never have allowed friendship-- for obvious reasons, he was a lot less pleased with our past history than I was-- but we had occasionally achieved something of an understanding. And then he died." Q's gaze dropped to his hands, uncharacteristically still and folded in his lap. "Thus proving that it's _never_ safe to care about mortals, I suppose."

This had probably been a bad idea to bring up. Q was more prone to depression when he was tired. T'Laren tried to bring the conversation around to something more cheerful. "You seem to have some feeling for Roth and Markow. Is that anything more than being entertained by their company?"

"With Harry, no... well, admittedly as I said I find his feelings toward _me_ rather flattering, but I suppose being flattered is a form of entertainment... so no, I'd say not. Daedalus, on the other hand..." Q thought about it. "I have a lot of respect for him. He did not fall quite so far as me, no, but he didn't start as high, either... and for a human, he's fallen hard indeed. You know that he wasn't born that way, of course."

"I know nothing about Dr. Peter Markow, except that you seem to be friendly with him and he appears to be confined to a floatchair. And he is well-respected."

"Daedalus got that way by trying to interface with... oh, the name wouldn't mean anything to you, but a long-dead species created devices for speed-teaching. You press against them and they feed the secrets of the universe into your brain. Given the fact that these creatures were energy lifeforms and could tolerate the intense stresses of the feed, this worked well for them. It worked less well for Markow. He burned out most of his neural pathways doing it... after a few years in therapy, it turned out that oddly, his actual mind was unaffected. He could still think as clearly as ever. But there hasn't yet been a neural regeneration technique invented that can repair the damage he did to the nerves in his body."

"Did he retain any of the knowledge?"

"He says it comes to him in dreams... Occasionally I'll tell him something and he'll claim he knew it already. But I think he's trying to console himself for his loss by pretending he got something out of it." Q turned morose again. "If he can fool himself successfully, more power to him. It's an ability I wish I had."

"Would you call him a friend?"

"I don't call anyone a friend, T'Laren."

"You called me a friend. This afternoon."

"Then you're the only one." His mouth twitched slightly. "I like Daedalus, I have a certain understanding with him, and we don't get on one another's nerves to nearly the extent that either of us get on everyone else's. I'll miss him if he dies before I do. But my impression of 'friendship' was that one is supposed to be able to confide in the other. And I could never confide in him-- less so him than others; he's the one person I've met who I can't be self-pitying around because the magnitude of his loss is as close to mine as a mere human can get."

"Have you ever met anyone you thought you could confide in?"

"I'm talking to her."

"Besides me."

"No." No hesitation. "The one time I thought I had, I... well, let's say I haven't had very good experiences with confiding in people." He stared into space, glowering, storm clouds visible in the set of his face. "Are you sure I can't have a sedative?"

T'Laren did not quite sigh. "Q, this is just your body's reaction to exhaustion," she said. "You know by now that you get especially depressed when you let yourself get overtired. You're not going to solve the problem in the long run by running away from your troubles with sedatives."

"Fine. Then I'd better go to bed." He stood up. "This wasn't one of my more brilliant ideas. I thought if I could just stay up while I was still feeling good, it would stay that way... stupid of me, I suppose."

"It's perfectly understandable. No one wants to go to bed when they're having fun. Do you need any help?"

"Help?" He raised his eyebrows at her.

"You're exhausted, and that outfit took you an hour to put on. Do you need help with it?"

Q smiled sardonically. "I do believe you're as bad as Harry, dear counselor," he said. "No, no, I'm not such an invalid-- or such a child-- that I require help getting my jammies on. You don't need to tuck me in, either."

"How about a lullaby?"

Q grinned. "How about--" he began to sing, rocking an imaginary baby in his arms with elaborate, exaggerated facial gestures intended to indicate fatherly concern, or maybe epilepsy-- "Go to sleep/go to sleep/go straight to sleep/ and don't wake up/ and don't wake up/ until at least mid-morning..'?"

His singing voice was hardly the best to start with. It was made considerably less lovely by being cracked and hoarse with exhaustion and giddiness. T'Laren came awfully close to laughing out loud. "You are terribly silly."

"An effect achieved by long years of practice, I assure you." The smile faded. "In any case. Good night."

"Sleep well."

"Not likely," he said, and stepped into his bedroom. The door swooshed closed behind him.

* * *

In her own room, T'Laren attempted to meditate. Exhaustion made this impossible, fraying her concentration and dragging her down. Before she knew it she was asleep.

_She was attempting to knit a pair of socks for her father. It was for a school project of some kind. Q came into the room. "T'Laren, I've got something to show you."_

She jerked awake with a gasp.

It had been months since she'd allowed herself to dream. She remembered the last time-- awakening, screaming, the darkness of the room around her become the darkness of her own tomb, and Lhoviri had been there, coaxing her back to sleep, but she would not... Lhoviri had warned her that if she tried to use the meditative disciplines to hold off dreaming entirely, it would be worse for her when her control finally broke. Brittle, she had assured him that she had no intention of breaking, ever again.

_Psychologist, heal thyself. _At least she hadn't screamed. If she'd woken Q, she would not have liked having to explain that she was the one with the nightmare this time. _What a hypocrite you are! You say he's psychologically addicted to sedatives, that he uses them to escape his dreams rather than facing the trauma that causes them. All true, but what is your excuse, dear doctor? You should know better!_

She was not sweating-- sweat was too precious a commodity on a desert to be released by fear. Vulcans only sweated when it was too hot even for them, or when they exerted themselves. But she was flushed green, and her heart pounded, and she was lightheaded from the adrenaline surge. After too long controlling themselves, Vulcans were known to get sick from sudden surges of emotion. T'Laren concentrated on the disciplines, ordering her rebellious body to compensate for the adrenaline reaction. After a moment, she stood up, throwing off her covers. She needed something else to concentrate on, something to burn out the rush of energy that made her lightheaded.

* * *

It was 0300 hours, the truly dead time in a starship's recreational centers. Everyone aboard was, as a general rule, either asleep or on duty at an hour like this, and the holodecks were generally free, unless someone had reserved one overnight. T'Laren checked, and found that none of them had been so reserved.

She slid the data solid into the slot by the door, and entered. "Computer. Activate training routine 9."

The program on the data solid sprang to life. Gravity dragged at her, a sudden downward yanking as her weight increased under Romulus gee, too close to Vulcan gee for her to detect the difference. But the atmosphere was different; as hot as Vulcan, but wetter, the air damp like Earth's and the oxygen thick. It was easy to hyperventilate in such an environment, with the gee subconsciously informing her body that she was on Vulcan now.

Four adult Romulan men came over the ridge ahead of her. They were not carrying phasers; the purpose of this simulation wasn't to test T'Laren's shooting abilities. She dropped into a fighting stance, legs positioned to maximize her balance, arms up and ready. At the same time, she let her face change, a savage smile spreading across it. Romulans and Vulcans could, under most circumstances, tell one another apart from the bone structure of their faces. But a Vulcan who behaved in an obviously Romulan fashion would confuse both races; there were far more genetic throwbacks, Romulans who looked like Vulcans, than there were Vulcans who would smile with savage passion. They would expect her to be one of them, to fight like a Romulan. Good.

Humans were arguably one of the physically weakest of the powerful races in known space; even the Ferengi, while weaker on average, were stronger than humans pound for pound-- it was just that humans were bigger than Ferengi. With typical ingenuity, humans had turned this racial weakness to an advantage, designing martial arts techniques that required very little physical strength, no more than a typical human had, and then teaching these techniques to Starfleet cadets. The reason Starfleet officers, overwhelmingly human, could hold their own in physical combat against far stronger races such as Klingons or Nausicaans or Romulans was the fact that those races, having strength, had never developed the techniques that did not require it. For a small, slight Vulcan female raised under Earth gee, physically weaker than other Vulcans and even than some humans, these techniques had proved vitally useful. For her training to go undercover, T'Laren had also adopted some of the Romulan _shal kemat_ techniques-- the fighting style developed by Romulan women to hold their own against their own men, another martial arts technique that owed little to physical strength. She used that mostly now, with a bit of her Starfleet training thrown in, to disable the first man that came at her, turning the force of his rush against him to throw him some distance. The next man came at her with arms wide, in an attempt to bear-hug and grapple. She ducked under him, grabbed him and threw him as well.

The next two were warier, circling her slowly, as their friends picked themselves off the ground. In a real fight, T'Laren would know herself to be outmatched at this point, and either surrender or run for it. That was, however, not the purpose of this simulation.

It was difficult to keep all of them in focus. T'Laren knew that if she didn't do something, the two she had attacked would recover-- she had only thrown them; they would only be winded, not badly hurt-- and then she would have to deal with four at once again. She edged away from the battleground, showing every sign of preparing to break and run. The two still standing watched intently, the look of predators waiting for the prey to break and run. T'Laren obliged them.

One of the two charged her. At the last possible second T'Laren ducked down, reached up and grabbed the man as he lunged, throwing him over her head. This was the second time she'd used that technique-- a bad idea; the simulations had been programmed to learn from their companions' mistakes. She straightened up and spun, sensing danger, to find herself directly facing the fourth. He hit her, hard, sending her flying to the ground.

Though she knew what to do, she didn't do it in time, her compensatory techniques thrown off by the heavier gravity. T'Laren hit the ground wrong, unable to roll and get back to her feet in time to keep the Romulan from diving onto her and pinning her with his weight. He hit her, trying to subdue her long enough that he could grab her arms, which she was moving rapidly. As he went after one, another one came up and found the junction at his neck. Since he had been programmed to expect a Romulan woman, given T'Laren's behavior, he had not been programmed to expect a nerve pinch.

As she pushed him off her and stood, one of the others grabbed her from behind. Inexcusably clumsy of her, to allow that. She tried to flip him, but he was prepared for that-- he lifted her off the ground, so she had no leverage and all the advantage was contained in his height and superior strength. T'Laren went completely limp and unresisting as he began to squeeze her, so he would assume he had already taken the fight out of her. The moment he stopped squeezing, she twisted and kicked backward, hard, into his kneecap, breaking it. The Romulan screamed and dropped her.

The two remaining Romulans were right there as she sprang back to her feet, though. They doubleteamed her, punching her repeatedly so she couldn't use the motion against them and throw them. She managed to grab one and try to fling him, but he outmaneuvered her, yanking _her_ off-balance. Then the fourth one chopped at the side of her neck-- the primitive precursor of the nerve pinch, the move as done by Romulans had neither the safety ratio nor the effectiveness of the millennia-refined Vulcan version, but it was sufficient. T'Laren sagged, stunned, and the simulation froze. She fell out of the one Romulan's grip and hit the dirt heavily, unable to persuade her body to work. The Vulcan version produced unconsciousness 98% of the time, rarely this sick, stunned numbness.

Well. A rather dismal showing over all. She had never been defeated this quickly-- when she'd first been introduced to this program, after training simulation 8 in which she'd fought one Klingon, it had taken the four stupid Romulans five minutes to subdue her. This had been one point six minutes. Once, she had been able to defeat all four Romulans in less than two minutes on a consistent basis... not that that had done any good; the one time she had needed her fighting skills behind the Neutral Zone, she had known, with logic and gut and every fiber of her being, that even with the element of surprise on her side she would never win. She would be hurt, and subdued, and then handed over to the elite Tal Shiar telepaths to be mindraped. Instead, she had chosen an entirely different kind of arena, used her body as a weapon in a totally different sense-- two totally different senses, in fact-- and forever destroyed her own innocence...

The downward slide had begun after that, the emotional turmoil, the needs Soram would not fulfill, the violence of her passions-- in hindsight she could see it had all begun after that one night. Perhaps she should have used martial arts on Melor after all. Perhaps in the end the damage would have been less.

Tears stung her eyes. Stunned as she was, she could not summon up the control of body and mind to prevent them. She lay there, unable to move, for several minutes, until pins and needles shot through her spine and sensation slowly returned. This hadn't helped much. All it had done was show her how much retraining she needed. Q would depend on her as a bodyguard, and she couldn't even disable four artificial Romulans. And if she were smart, now, she'd go to Sickbay and get the various bruises and scrapes she'd just picked up treated before Q saw them and asked what was wrong. She didn't want to go to Sickbay-- most doctors were human, and had a falsely jovial need to make small talk with a patient, to ask how she got hurt and warn her against doing it again. The artificial friendliness of humans was more than she thought she could take right now-- but it would be utterly moronic to waste a healing trance on this. Sighing, she struggled to her feet, summoned up her control, and left the holodeck, the program vanishing behind her.

* * *

The intercom bleeped at an hour that human beings were most certainly not evolved to be awoken at. Q came fully awake, heart pounding, convinced that this was the notification of impending Borg invasion, and then realized that these were not his quarters on Starbase 56. He puzzled over this for a few seconds as the intercom bleeped again. Slowly it dawned on him that the Borg had been defeated two years ago and that he was currently on _Yamato_ for a conference. Right. That made sense.

"Q here."

"Are you all right, Q?" a perky young Vulcan asked. Q hated perky young people. Perky young Vulcans were the worst.

"I'm perfectly fine, Sovaz. Nothing that another six years of sleep wouldn't cure. Why did you feel the need to call and check up on me?"

"Are you aware that it's 1115 hours? The conference was supposed to have started 15 minutes ago."

So it was. Q checked the chronometer. It had to be malfunctioning. The last time he'd looked at it, it said 0640 hours, and that had only been a few minutes ago.

"I was planning on being fashionably late, actually," he said.

"I don't think there are any species aboard that really consider lateness to be fashionable," Sovaz said seriously. "But I will confess that I'm not an expert on what various beings consider fashionable or not."

"You're not? I _never_ would have known."

"No, I'm not." Puzzlement, hesitation, then sudden comprehension. "Oh! You're being sarcastic. I see."

"A remarkable deduction. Here's one of those freebies for you, my dear. Bowl cuts are not considered fashionable by _anybody_. Especially when they've been growing out for half a year." Q sighed. "Is everybody else there?"

"Several members have begged off due to illness. Are you ill?"

"No, and neither are they. I'd suspect that _somebody_ found the real stuff in amongst the synthehol. I, however, am making a personal statement by being late. You can tell them that."

"So when do you plan to arrive?"

"When I feel like it." He relented. "In an hour. Good-_bye_, Sovaz."

Now where the hell was T'Laren? And why hadn't she woken him up? Q hadn't planned to oversleep, but he had forgotten to tell the computer to wake him-- not normally a major oversight, since normally he had his own personal computer with the infallible time sense come in and wake him if he overslept. Where _was_ she? He got up and padded out of the room, leaning on the bell to hers. No answer.

"Computer, locate T'Laren."

"Dr. T'Laren is in Holodeck 3."

"Well, that's just peachy." He touched his badge. "Q to T'Laren, where the hell are you?"

A few seconds lag time. "In Holodeck 3," she finally replied-- which, of course, he knew, having just asked the computer. Q made an exasperated noise.

"Let me rephrase that. What the hell are you _doing_ in Holodeck 3?"

"Exercising and training." She sounded drained. "Why aren't you at the conference?"

"Because no one was around to wake me up," he told her in a tone of infinite patience.

"You didn't set the computer to wake you."

"No, I didn't. A small oversight. I didn't realize you'd be _exercising_ at this ungodly hour--"

"Ungodly? It's 1120. You normally get up two hours before this. Of course, you don't normally wait until 0300 to go to bed."

"Nor do I normally spend four hours tossing and turning, drifting off and waking up with nightmares, and generally getting no sleep at all. Actually, come to think of it, that _has_ been normal since I met you."

She sighed. "You can't have it both ways, Q," she said. "Either I coddle and protect you from yourself, which means you grant me control over you, or you take responsibility for your own behavior in exchange for the freedom to do as you wish. You've made it abundantly clear that you don't want to do what I tell you when I tell you something for your own good. Such as suggesting that you might want to go to bed at a reasonable hour."

"Well, if I had _known_ that you had given up on trying to be my mommy, I would have _realized_ I couldn't depend on you to wake me up. What if I had needed you?"

"You could have called me. As you apparently did, so I must assume that you know how to operate a combadge."

So she wanted to get snippy, eh? "You're obviously incapable of being reasonable at the moment," Q said loftily. "I have a conference to attend. Goodbye, T'Laren." Let her chew on that one.

It was actually an hour and a half before he considered himself presentable enough to appear at the conference. When he walked in, there appeared to be a heated debate in progress. Everyone stopped talking for a moment and looked over at him.

"Q. How nice of you to join us," Dhawan said with heavy sarcasm.

"I thought I'd give you some time to formulate your silly little theories and marshal your arguments before I came in and explained everything to you," Q said. "Please, don't stop arguing on my account. Go on with your debate. I'm sure it's quite entertaining."

"I can't imagine how you'd find it so," Dr. Anne Christian said coldly. "Nobody's getting killed."

Dr. Christian made Q extremely uncomfortable. He smiled to cover his discomfort. She was another name he'd seemed to have overlooked on the guest list. Perhaps he should check the roster again. "Anne, dear, you wound me. Do you think I have a one-track mind?"

"Q's character is dead. Can we stop assassinating it now and do something useful?" Markow asked. "Dhawan, I can't believe that a person who's gotten to be science officer on a Galaxy-class starship could overlook an effect of that magnitude..."

Q sat down in one of the many empty chairs toward the end of the table-- apparently a lot of people hadn't shown up, including Roth and Morakh. Too bad; Roth was fun to sit next to and whisper rude comments about others, and Morakh was generally fun to bait. He quickly picked up the gist of the argument and smiled to himself. They weren't even in the right ballpark-- like philosophers attempting to deduce the circumference of the flat Earth.

For the next half hour, Q listened to their silly arguments, not entirely able to repress a smirk, as he doodled idly on his datapad. The debate was between two different theories-- if anyone had anything entirely different, they weren't mentioning it. Markow's was, as it had been last night, that it was a side effect of time travel, which begged the question of whose time travel, obviously. Q had intended last night to get the evidence to refute that one, as he had a gut certainty it was wrong, but he hadn't yet figured out _why_ it was wrong, other than his intuitive sense that the universe just didn't work like that. The other argument, proposed by a Romulan woman named Milarca, was that the singularity was a gateway to an alternate universe, and that was just rampant idiocy. For some reason, several people seemed to agree with her, and were arguing with Markow and a Vulcan named Toral, who was a proponent of Markow's theory. Most of the others were merely adding commentary to the debate.

Finally, in a poisonous voice, Shahrazad Dhawan finally gave Q his opening. "Well, why don't we ask the self-proclaimed expert?" she declaimed, getting up and walking over to Q. "I suppose this puzzle is so terribly obvious to you that you have nothing better to do than doodle on your padd."

She was trying to shame Q. Q smiled at her with genuine delight-- it was not often he met someone as terribly inept at attacking him as Dhawan. "Commander Dhawan, I'm surprised," he said. "That's the first thing you've said showing the _slightest_ fragment of intellect all day."

"If you know what the singularity is, perhaps you might wish to end the suspense," Milarca said sharply.

"Oh, I couldn't do that-- I wouldn't want to deny you the pleasure of solving the problem yourselves. But if you're looking for hints, I think I could drop a few. For instance, Dr. Milarca, did it _ever_ occur to you to look for emissions of nadion particles in coming up with your rather remarkable hypothesis?"

Milarca narrowed her eyes at him. "And exactly why would I want to do that?"

Q sighed. "I suppose I need to spell it out," he said. He stood up and paced, aware of the fact that every eye was on him-- and, despite his show of exasperation, he was delighted with the fact. "If you bothered to measure the intensity of nadion particles, you'd realize there are far too many of them for this singularity to _possibly_ be connected to a parallel universe."

Now Milarca was staring at him. "How am I supposed to realize that?" she asked, her voice sharp with anger and bewilderment. "I'd never heard that nadion particles had _any_ connection to alternate universes. To my knowledge, the only thing nadion particles have anything to do with is the local gravitometric patterns."

He had her now. Q smiled sweetly. "And did it never occur to you that _maybe_, just _maybe_, a singularity would cause a fairly sizable alteration in the local gravitometric patterns?"

"Of course!" she snapped. "And the particle concentration reflects that."

Dhawan said, "Look, we've all been over this. The nadion particle concentration is a little on the low side, but perfectly within acceptable tolerance levels for a singularity of this intensity--"

"Oh, _acceptable_ tolerance. Defined by who, may I ask? Have you become the arbiters of what is acceptable for stellar phenomena?" Q walked over to Dhawan and leaned on the back of her seat until she stood up to face him.

"Defined by patterns detected by empirical research," Dhawan snapped.

"Ah. Defined by the limitations of what data you've actually gotten to collect, and what you've bothered to correlate. I see., That makes it _so_ much clearer." He was really enjoying himself. He'd forgotten how much fun this could be.

"Lucy, spit it out," Markow said. "Obviously you think you're privy to some information we mere mortals don't share. How about you do your job instead of putting on a show and _tell_ us what we're missing?"

"I am suitably chastised," Q said, and grinned. "Very well. Since none of you have seen fit to correlate patterns of nadion radiation with known incidences of alter-gateways, I suppose I _will_ have to spell it out in words of two syllables or less." He was now standing at the head of the table, having totally usurped Dhawan's position there. He leaned forward, as if imparting a secret of great import to the gathering. "At the boundaries between what you call parallel universes, all gravitational forces are annihilated. This naturally doesn't affect the concentration of gravitons visibly, since there's so many of the things around a singularity that you can't detect the distinction with your feeble instruments. But you _can_ detect the decrease in nadion particles caused by their annihilation at the boundary. Apparently it simply never occurred to you to look for such an effect, but I assure you, it is there. And _that_, Dr. Milarca, completely shoots your theory down, I'm afraid. The nadion concentrations are characteristic of a singularity that is _not_ associated with a parallel universe boundary."

"And is there any proof of this, other than your word for it?" Milarca asked evenly.

"Oh, I'm so glad you asked that. Computer! Access the Federation Physics Institute's records for all studies of singularities, wormholes, and other major temporal/spatial disturbances. Display nadion particle emissions, graviton emissions, and conclusions as to the causes of each event."

"The requested operation will take three point five minutes to complete," the computer informed him.

"Peachy. Do it anyway."

"Why does that happen?" Sovaz asked.

Q spun. "Excuse me?"

"Why is gravity annihilated at the boundaries between universes?"

"Sovaz, he hasn't even proven that it _is_, and you're asking him _why_ it is?" Dhawan asked,

"Q has considerably more expertise in these matters than we do," Sovaz said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "And I do not think that he would lie."

"Why not?" Dhawan asked sharply. "Considering his past history--"

"No," Anne Christian said. "Q isn't likely to lie about something this trivial. He'll reserve his lies for when he can cause maximum pain."

"Anne, you seem utterly fixated on this notion of me as a ruthless villain. I'm beginning to think you don't love me."

"I wonder if the Federation Council's pardon would protect you from a lawsuit for wrongful death?" Christian murmured.

Q ignored her. It was an empty threat, more or less-- even if she sued him for her son's death and won, he was valuable enough that the Federation would pay the damages for him. "Considering my past history, Commander Dhawan, I would be utterly foolish to lie to you. Let's not forget that I have no pet theories to endorse or sacred cows to hold inviolable. I _know_ what the fundamental structure of the universe is-- and the Federation is paying me a great deal to explain it to limited creatures like you. I am hardly short-sighted enough to jeopardize my meal ticket, my dear. Give me _some_ credit."

"Is artificial gravitation affected by the boundary crossing?" Sovaz asked. "For instance, if someone were to fly into a singularity that _did_ lead to an alternate universe, would the artificial gravity fail during the passage?"

At this point the information Q had requested appeared on the holographic display in the middle of the table. "Yes and no," Q said to Sovaz, and then turned his attention to the display, jabbing his fingers into it and calling for the computer to recalculate various figures. In his best lecturing mode, he demonstrated that the concentration of nadion particles was invariably at least .3% lower near a singularity associated with another universe.

When he was done, Milarca nodded simply. "Very well. I will bow to the evidence. But I'm not yet convinced that Dr. Markow's theory is correct, either. Does this gravitational annihilation effect take place when time travel occurs as well?"

"No. There's a warping effect, which alters the _frequency_ of the nadions, but your equipment isn't sensitive enough to detect that."

"Lucy, if you know what's causing the singularity, stop beating around the bush and tell us," Markow said.

Q made a face. "Unfortunately, I'm limited by your inferior equipment. I can't directly sense what's causing the anomaly; all I can tell you right now is what's _not_ causing it. Of course, I've also only had a day to think about it. Give me a few days."

"No brilliant theories?"

"I'd hardly wish to prejudice you, Daedalus. No, I'll leave the brilliant theories to you for the moment."

A man named Blumenthal said, "But look, what if we're looking at this all the wrong way? It's just occurred to me--"

Having had his moment in the sun, Q yielded the stage with more grace than he'd thought he'd be able to manage, and let Blumenthal expound on his silly theory. He dropped an occasional scathing comment into the gathering, but ignored the proceedings for the most part, concentrating on collecting the information he needed to disprove Markow.

People trickled in over the next several hours, but none of them were Roth, or anyone Q might be interested in making fun of-- although one of the humans, a Madeline LeBeau, was sufficiently and undeservedly arrogant to the point where Q noted her for later knocking down. At 1700 the conference broke up, people going off to discuss theories in private groups, do more research, or relax and have fun. With some startlement, Q realized that he was extremely hungry-- he hadn't had anything since he got up this morning, and hadn't really noticed until now. Well. He had no intention of going off to Ten-Forward to be lonely, and since Markow hated eating with other people and Roth wasn't here, there was no chance he'd get some company. He decided to check back at the room and see what T'Laren was doing. Much as he hated to admit it, he'd gotten rather used to eating with other people-- well, with her, anyway-- aboard _Ketaya_.

As he left, Sovaz caught up with him. "Why are gravitational forces destroyed at the boundaries between universes?" she asked. Q marveled at her single-mindedness.

"Haven't you anything better to do?" he asked.

"No," Sovaz said seriously. "You demonstrated to the conference's satisfaction that the effect _occurs_, but any other physicist could have done that. You must have the ability to explain _why_ that happens. Don't you?"

"That depends on how much detail you want," Q said. A truly evil idea was occurring to him. "Listen, Sovaz, I'm off to get something to eat. Want to go with me and ask your questions?"

"Certainly. They make a very tasty couscous at Ten-Forward--"

"No, no no. We're not going there. I'm off stage now, I have no desire to continue to be a public spectacle." He turned to her, barely able to restrain a mischievous grin. "I'm going to my quarters for something to eat. Still want to come along?"

"T'Laren will be there?"

"Almost undoubtedly."

Sovaz hesitated. "If I didn't go with you, would you still answer my questions?"

"When I get around to it, the next time you catch me with nothing better to do, in a few days or so... sure, why not."

For a Vulcan, Sovaz had lousy facial control-- or maybe Q had just gotten used to trying to read T'Laren. Her face changed, a scaled-down version of a human face falling. Then the mask slid into place. "If T'Laren is offended at my presence, that is her problem," Sovaz declared. "It's my job to learn all I can from the delegates."

Q allowed the grin to break out on his face, briefly. "Delightful." He began to walk back toward the VIP quarters, wondering why they hadn't chosen a conference room closer to said quarters. "The most basic explanation I can give you is that the gravitational constant is tied into the definition of the universe far more so than the electromagnetic forces. Space is defined by the interaction of gravitons and locons, and time is defined as the interaction of chronatons with the other two. At least, to the perception of mortals-- we won't get into what it looks like when you can invert locons at will. But in any case, the point is that those three particles are actually more like threads, that the fabric of the universe is woven of. When you hit the boundary of the universe, the substrate that the gravitons propagate in, the gravitons can no longer propagate. It's like trying to make a sound in vacuum. There's nothing there to carry the wave. Does that help any?"

"Does that also mean that time and space disappear outside the boundaries of the universe?"

"Clever child. Yes, of course they do. But they leave behind a residual charge which makes it more likely that when you re-enter another universe, you'll come out in a similar time and space-- assuming of course that the other universe operates by the same physical laws. Now if you managed to get lost between the boundaries of the universes, you could completely lose all temporal and spatial charge and end up literally anywhere in space and time when you finally get through the barriers."

"That's fascinating," Sovaz said, and appeared to mean it-- Q tended to use "fascinating" only in a sarcastic sense.

"To me it's rather dull, if you want to know the truth," Q said. "It was interesting a few hundred millennia ago when I was first learning to manipulate all that, but nowadays my interests have taken a decidedly mundane turn. For instance. My understanding is that T'Laren used to be married to your brother? What's going on with that?"

"As far as I know, nothing is going on," Sovaz said, a bit bewildered. "They are no longer bonded."

"Right, but how did it happen? My understanding was that Vulcans don't go about divorcing each other every day of the week."

"I don't understand what happened myself," Sovaz said, staring ahead at nothing. "Soram reported that T'Laren was dead. I don't see how her bondmate could be mistaken about such a thing, yet she is obviously not dead, so he _must_ have been mistaken..."

"How did they get together in the first place?" If T'Laren wouldn't tell him anything about her background, he'd go behind her back and get it.

Sovaz considered. "They were bonded when I was very young, so I'm not entirely sure. But I believe what happened was that Soram requested a wife from the Marriage Registry--"

"The Marriage Registry? Let me guess-- a Vulcan dating service?" The idea of a Vulcan dating service had to be one of the stranger things he'd heard in the past three years...

"Not a dating service. If I understand it correctly, a dating service is where humans turn to be partnered with someone for companionship?"

"One could phrase it that way, I suppose."

"Vulcans do not casually seek companionship," Sovaz said seriously. "Most Vulcans are bonded to their future betrothed at the age of seven. But in some cases, the betrothed dies before the appointed time, and the person left unbonded must turn to the Marriage Registry to find another unbonded. In other cases-- for instance, my parents are progressives. They believed Soram and I should be free to make our own choices on adulthood. But Soram is a very strict traditionalist. As soon as he became old enough, he applied to the Marriage Registry for a wife. And as T'Laren had been raised on Earth, she too was unbonded, so the Registry partnered them, and our families thought the match would be a good idea. Soram was planning to go into Starfleet, where one needs to have dealings with humans, so having a wife experienced in human culture seemed logical. And T'Laren wished to learn Vulcan ways, so having a strict traditionalist husband seemed logical as well."

"But things didn't work out as logically as planned, I take it."

Sovaz made a semi-shrug. "They seemed to be working out adequately to me. But I confess I have no experience in matters of bonding. I have no explanation for what happened."

"What _did_ happen? As far as you know?"

"I don't wish to violate T'Laren's privacy. If she meant for you to know, she likely would have told you."

So the kid had some backbone after all. Q was genuinely beginning to like this girl. "Oh, T'Laren told me a few gazillion things. For instance, that she went nuts and tried to kill herself. So if _that's_ what you're edging around, don't worry about it-- I already know."

"She told you _that?_" Quickly Sovaz tried to regain her composure. "I... that is not the sort of thing most people tell anyone outside the family, or perhaps very close friends. I was under the impression that you were T'Laren's client."

"Client. Oh, that's a good word. I like that one. Sounds so much better than 'patient.'"

"But aren't you?"

"Why? Does it matter?"

"I wouldn't think... that she would share such personal information with a client."

"Whatever works, kiddo. I assure you that T'Laren had what she believed to be good reasons to tell me what she did. Now. Is it true? _Is_ that what happened?"

"I don't know..."

At that point they reached Q's quarters. Q imagined a look of relief on Sovaz's face, and grinned to himself. Any relief she felt had to be premature. He palmed open the door and went in. "Yoo-hoo! T'Laren! I hope you look passable, because I've brought us a dinner guest!"

T'Laren stepped out of her bedroom and froze. Q could no longer restrain the grin. "She followed me home, Mom. Can I keep her?"

The effort of will it took T'Laren to unfreeze was practically visible. "I'm rather tired, actually," she said. "I think I would prefer to go lie down."

"I'm sure you would prefer it, but we can't always get what we want. Now are you going to be completely rude to my houseguest and set me a terrible example, or are you going to be a gracious little Vulcan?"

For several seconds she stared at him, her face icily masklike. "Very well," she said finally. "You are entitled to invite what houseguests you desire. I shall be a gracious hostess."

"You need not be concerned that I should shame you," Sovaz said; the cadences of her voice indicated that she was speaking Vulcan, and the translator was rendering it. "My business here is with Q. I am not concerned with you."

"Oh, come on, folks," Q said cheerily. "Let's all _try_ to get along here, shall we?" He plopped himself down on the couch. "T'Laren! Why don't you get us something to eat?"

Much to his surprise, she turned toward the replicator, showing every sign of obeying. Belatedly he realized that he'd just given her an excuse to not confront Sovaz again.

"Does artificial gravity disappear when one crosses the boundaries between universes?" Sovaz asked.

"Depends on the method of generation. If you're using a graviton field, then sure-- gravitons are annihilated. But you're not likely to detect the effect, since it lasts less than a nanosecond in most crossings between universes. Since time is also annihilated, most boundary crossings are effectively instantaneous."

"But if one got lost between universes, as you were talking about before. What then? Would the inhabitants of the lost ship still feel the passage of time, even though time had been annihilated? Or would it feel to them as if no time had passed?"

"Hmm. You know, I've never seen a mortal get lost between the boundaries of the universes, so I really couldn't tell you. I know that a Q who gets lost perceives the passage of a form of subjective time, but then we have multiple temporal senses, and not all of them have anything to do with chronatons. I would suspect, mortal senses being as paltry as they are, that if mortals got lost outside time their mental functions would come to a screeching halt."

T'Laren returned with plates of some kind of vegetable stew, and set them down in front of Q and Sovaz, silently. Q picked through his for a moment, then looked up. "Not all of us are root-suckers, my dear. Could you possibly arrange something a little bit more to the tastes of an omnivore?"

"One would think that, in your desire to be a gracious host, you would avoid offending your vegetarian guest with the smell of meat," T'Laren said.

Q grinned. Wonderful, she was fighting back. He had started to worry. "Well, let me ask," he said. "Sovaz! Would it bother you if a severely underweight omnivorous being who can't process vegetable protein as efficiently as animal and who is in obvious and desperate need of something to help build back his muscles to something remotely resembling normal fulfilled his nutritional requirements in your presence?"

"It would be illogical to do otherwise," Sovaz said blandly. "I would not wish to be responsible for a human's lack of proper nutrition."

"There, you see? _Some_ Vulcan guests don't get offended by perfectly logical requests. Now why don't you get me something with a modicum of protein?"

"Since I am hardly an expert on your desires, it might be best for you if you got it yourself," T'Laren retorted. Her voice was still cool and emotionless, but there was a faint edge to it-- it was a retort, all right.

Q sighed ostentatiously. "_Very_ well. _If_ I must." He got up carefully-- he didn't want Sovaz to see him hurt himself by trying to stretch his body out too rapidly or bending his back wrong-- and walked over to the replicator. "Anything to drink, Sovaz?"

"I'm rather fond of tomato juice," Sovaz offered.

"Fine. One beef stew, one Tipharean bubble-juice with grape, and one tomato juice." He glanced over at T'Laren, who had retreated to a chair across the room and was watching him intently, sipping a glass of mineral water. "Done with your food already, T'Laren? Or did you hide the rest of that repulsive stew under the potted plant?"

"Why would I wish to hide my stew under a potted plant?" T'Laren asked, doing a wonderful impression of Vulcan bewilderment at human non sequiturs.

Sovaz glanced at T'Laren and then at Q. "Why _would_ she wish to hide her stew under a potted plant? Is this a human custom?"

"A very popular one," Q assured Sovaz. "Human children indulge in it all the time. When their mothers tell them to eat their food because of the starving children on Bajor, human children come up with some very ingenious methods of hiding the food. T'Laren, don't tell me _you_ never hid your food under a napkin or fed it to the family dog! Come clean. You can tell us, we're all friends here."

"It would be illogical to waste food," T'Laren said.

"So? What's your point?"

"On that topic," Sovaz said, "since it _would_ be illogical to waste food and you apparently find your vegetable stew unpleasant, would you mind if I finished it?"

"How much time have you been spending with Counselor Tris lately?" T'Laren asked Sovaz-- the first thing she'd said directly to the girl-- as Q sat down with his food and motioned for her to go ahead.

"Why do you ask?" Sovaz countered.

"It seems you have picked up some of his habits. Be cautious. Few humans are offended if you ask for their food, but other species can be."

"Why would they be?" Sovaz asked. "If they do not wish to finish their food, why should it offend them that someone else should do so for them?"

"Because-- and this is a very important point, Sovaz, so Pay Attention-- Aliens Are Not Logical," Q pronounced. "If it helps, put it to music and make a song of it. Aliens Are Not Logical. In fact, _no_ one but Vulcans places any cultural emphasis on being logical. Aliens will get offended by the damnedest things. You want to hear a funny story?"

"Assuming you are capable of telling one, by all means go ahead," T'Laren said.

"Oh, this is a laugh a minute, I'm telling you. There's a race out in what you call the Gamma Quadrant, who call themselves the Sintisee. About fifty thousand years ago, a mutation changed the color of Sintisee hair, which was up to that point pretty uniformly blue. Now a race of Sintisee with _purple_ hair emerged. You got that? Well, since the two groups first encountered one another about three thousand years ago, they've made all sorts of edicts on what it really _means_ to have purple or blue hair. Mind you, biologically there's no difference between the two other than hair color, but at various times they have enslaved each other, conducted pogroms, exiled each other, or decided that the other was intellectually inferior. Learned treatises were written on why blueheads would never become engineers or scientists in a country dominated by purpleheads; in blueheaded countries, it was determined that purpleheads were naturally cruel and emotionally crippled and could never be allowed positions of power. Or vice versa, depending on the time and the place. I mean, it was just incredible."

"And there is no difference between the two other than hair color?"

"No biological difference. A lot of cultural differences from centuries of segregation. Anyway, one morning they all-- the entire planet-- woke up to find their hair a uniform bright green."

"How did that happen?" Sovaz asked.

Q rolled his eyes. "Take a wild guess, Sovaz."

Sovaz looked confused. "I don't have enough information to hypothesize--"

"He means he did it," T'Laren said.

"Oh." Sovaz nodded.

"So now their little prop had been kicked out from under them. There was no way to tell by _looking_ at people whether they had been blueheads or purpleheads, since everyone had the same green hair color. And it was the same shade of green, too. Boring, but then science often is. So what do you think they did? Did they realize how silly the distinction had always been and live in peace and harmony forevermore?"

"That would have been the logical solution," Sovaz said, "so I must assume that that is _not_ what they did, since this is a story about alien illogic, right?"

"Oh how right you are. No, they started trying to _empirically figure out_ what color people's hair _used_ to be. They used photo reference, they used speech patterns, they used aptitude tests-- _aptitude tests! _They took it into their heads that purpleheads were stupid or blueheads were intuitive and emotional, and _tested_ people on that basis! Unbelievable! And _then--_ this is what kills me-- they passed a law saying that everyone had to _dye their hair_ back to its original color!" He was laughing as he remembered. He also remembered that there had been revolutions and pogroms, witchhunts for mis-dyed folk and the institution of entirely new prejudices, but he suspected the Vulcans wouldn't find all that nearly as funny as he had at the time. "Is that or is that not the funniest thing you've heard?"

Sovaz blinked. "I find the whole story somewhat tragic, actually."

Q sighed. "You would. The problem with you Vulcans is you have no sense of humor."

"I'm sorry if I offended you," Sovaz said earnestly. "I'm sure a human would find your story very funny."

"It depends on how well the human knew Q," T'Laren said.

"Let's not start, ok?" All Q needed was for T'Laren to decide to go into a recitation of his crimes against the universe. Besides, he _still_ thought it had been funny.

"Would it be possible for me to have more stew?"

Q scrutinized Sovaz. She was small and slender, just as she'd been ten minutes ago. "Three bowls of stew? You're going to get quite chunky, my girl. Better break out that holodeck exercise program."

"You may of course have more stew," T'Laren said. "Q is probably unaware that your metabolism is still in its adolescent phase."

"You mean she's still _growing? _Horrors! T'Laren, she's going to grow up to be as gawky as you!"

"I am not still growing," Sovaz explained. "Not in terms of height. However, I have not yet completed the transition to maturity."

"And yet you seem so worldly-wise."

For several seconds Sovaz looked puzzled. "Oh! That is a joke, isn't it? Most sentients do not consider me worldly-wise."

"Sure, Sovaz. Kill the joke, why don't you."

"It really was a mercy killing," T'Laren said.

"As defined by a Vulcan? Oh, I am cut to the quick. A Vulcan finds me unhumorous. What tragedy. What pain."

"Since you did not disprove Dr. Markow's theory, do you believe it is possible that the singularity represents the after-effects of time travel?" Sovaz asked.

Q stared for a second, trying to figure out if that was supposed to be a conversational save. He decided it wasn't, and glanced over at T'Laren, jerking a thumb toward Sovaz. "She get that from you?"

"What?"

"She never lets up, does she?"

"I did come here to ask you questions about the singularity," Sovaz said, a tiny note of defensive reproof in her voice.

"Oh, of course. By all means. Ask away."

"I just did."

"Did you now?" He considered. "Hmm, I guess you did. What do I think of Markow's theory?"

"Yes. Do you believe it is possible?"

"Possible? Sure. Likely? Not bloody. The odds of that singularity turning out to be caused by time travel are about equivalent to the odds of T'Laren standing up on the coffee table here and singing 'It's Not Easy Being Green.' _Possible_, sure, but I wouldn't bet money on it."

"Can you explain why not?"

"Not yet. If I could, I'd have shot him down in the conference. But..." He shrugged. "Working with time and space as many millions of years as I have, you get a feel for things. An intuition, if you will. Were I still in possession of all my powers, I could probably tell you exactly why the singularity is probably not caused by time travel-- but then, if I had my powers, all I'd have to do is scan the thing and I'd know just what _did_ cause it. I just don't think the universe works that way. It _feels_ wrong. And while my intuition is, I'm convinced, far more valuable than ten limited little mortals' experimental hypotheses, the rest of the conference doesn't see it that way. So I can't shoot down Markow's theory until I've figured out exactly why it's wrong."

"Do you have a theory of your own?"

"Dear child, of _course_ I have a theory. I would be entirely remiss in my duties if I didn't have a theory."

"But you haven't proposed it. What is your theory?"

Q smiled broadly. "That would be telling."

"But it is your _job_ to tell what your theory is."

"No, no, no. I assure you that that is not my job. _My_ job is to shoot down everyone _else's_ theory."

"That makes no sense."

"It makes perfect sense. You just don't realize it because of your basic misconception as to what this conference is about." Q stood up, placing his empty bowl on the coffee table, and paced. "I'm sure you think that the point to this conference is to discover the true nature of the singularity. Right?"

"Well... yes, of course."

"_That_ is your first mistake. If the point was to discover the true nature of the singularity, they'd give me their fanciest equipment and hire me to stare at the readouts for oh, about three days. A week, tops. And then I would _tell_ them, and they would know. No, that's not what the point here is. The point is to make all the top scientists in the Federation feel like they are doing something useful and contributing to the betterment of humanity-- and other sentiences in the Federation. It's Starfleet's solution to everything. Can't figure out which end is up? Form a committee. Somehow humans have gotten this notion into their heads that there is safety in numbers. If all the top scientists agree, it _must_ be true. Never mind the glaring disproofs of that maxim-- you said you met Commander Data, right?"

"Yes."

"Everyone in the Federation's scientific community thought his creator was utterly wacko for believing he could build a sentient android. If it were true that majority opinion is always or even usually right, Data would likely not exist today. And yet he moves." He looked directly at Sovaz. "Did it ever occur to you to wonder why you, a junior officer, are the primary liaison between the conference and the ship? Why wasn't that job given to your superior, Commander Dhawan?"

Sovaz considered. "I had thought it to be intended as a learning experience. Also, Commander Dhawan is herself participating in the conference. This would interfere with her ability to effectively moderate it."

"I doubt it. No, I'll tell you the _real_ reason, Sovaz. The real reason is that Dhawan is a raging egotist with a serious tact impairment." He grinned. "As a fellow sufferer of _that_ particular affliction, I can sympathize. But the point is that she is incapable of managing this conference because she perceives it as a challenge to her competence, and she's right. If Starfleet really were concerned only with results, and truly didn't give a damn how they were obtained, this conference would be a genuine scientific endeavor rather than a three-ring circus. Morakh, for instance, does not deserve to be here. I've been accused of bigotry against Klingons, and I admit, I haven't a very high opinion of the species. But I don't think Morakh should be excluded because he's a Klingon; I think he should be excluded because he simply is not one of the Federation's top 40 physicists. There are probably Klingons brighter than he is, and the only Vulcan I've ever met who couldn't run rings around him mathematically is T'Laren over there."

"Who do you think _should_ be included?" Sovaz asked, puzzled.

"About a fourth of the people that are actually here, tops. Roth, entertaining as he is, is not one of the Federation's best. Dhawan herself should be here; Markow should be here; I don't know about Elejani Baíi. Milarca should not. LeBeau should not. Pergiun should not."

"And you?"

"I'm out of all of their leagues," Q said, grinning darkly. "If they _really_ wanted to solve the problem, they should have hired me to come out here and solve it for them, like I said. In terms of merit, I certainly should be here. In terms of what this conference is actually about, I probably should not."

"Q's cynicism must be taken with a grain of salt," T'Laren advised. "He may be very knowledgeable about physics, but he views all humanoid interaction through the filter of his own experience-- and his experience is with the worst of humanoid behavior. He has very little ability to give anyone the benefit of the doubt."

"Difficult when there is no doubt to be benefited from," Q said. "Vulcans are often unable to comprehend the pettiness and stupidities of other humanoid races. I have no difficulty seeing humanoids' virtues, on the rare occasions when they display them; but I'm far better aware than Sovaz is of how stupid most people are."

"I don't understand people," Sovaz confessed. "I understand Vulcans a bit better than I do most other kinds of people, but I don't really understand Vulcans either. I create a model in my head of what I believe a person will do, based on past experience, and then they do something completely contrary." She stood up, picking up her three empty bowls. "Physics is much easier."

"Of course," Q said. "The underlying laws that govern the behavior of the universe are actually very, very simple. Sentient beings make themselves unnecessarily complicated. I firmly believe that the only way one can understand a sentient being's behavior is by analogizing their mental processes to one's own-- which has never worked for me; my mental processes are completely different from anyone else's."

"That should serve as your model for arrogance, Sovaz," T'Laren said coolly. "In fact, Q's mental processes are entirely predictable using a model that assumes him to be human; he simply prefers to believe himself beyond anyone's ken."

"_Entirely_ predictable, dear doctor? I hardly think so."

"Indeed. When you are not aware that I am predicting you, your behavior is entirely predictable. When you _are_ aware, you typically become angry and do something random to demonstrate your unpredictability."

The idea of being predictable did, in fact, make him angry-- but now that she had thrown down the gauntlet, he could _not_ give her the reaction she'd predicted. So he laughed. "Oh, T'Laren, you're delightful," he said. He turned to Sovaz and said conspiratorially, "She's mad at me for inviting you here."

"I cannot imagine why," Sovaz said. "I would very much like to know, though." She glanced at T'Laren, a sudden hard look on her face.

"Well, T'Laren? You seem so interested in enlightening the child, perhaps you'd like to explain your own unusual behavior?" This was perfect. He watched T'Laren with barely concealed glee.

T'Laren looked away, as if smoothing her mask in place. When she looked back at them, her face had the stillness of death, an unhealthy drained look-- not a mask rigidly holding emotion in check, but as if too much energy had been drained from it to show emotion. "Sovaz, I ask forgiveness," she said. "I cannot tell you why I chose suicide, nor why I behaved as I did earlier. The two are related, however. My weakness lingers, and I have not yet achieved full health."

"These things are understood," Sovaz said. It sounded like a formal Vulcan phrase. In fact the whole exchange sounded like Vulcan platitudes, dancing around the terms of the actual offense. Q was annoyed.

"You're just going to let her go with that?" he demanded of Sovaz. "After she humiliated you publicly the way she did?"

Sovaz tilted an eyebrow at him. "Vulcans do not feel humiliated at the actions of others," she said. "T'Laren cannot shame me."

"Right. Uh-huh. Sure."

"This has been an enlightening conversation, Q," Sovaz said. "I thank you." Her own Vulcan mask was firmly in place. Q could only stare at her, mentally spluttering with frustration, as she nodded at T'Laren and left.

"You _people!_" he burst out as she left. "You unutterably _infuriating people!_"

"Infuriating because we will not cooperate in your little games?" T'Laren asked.

"Infuriating because you won't stand up for what you feel, or admit to it, or apologize properly for hurting someone else, or _demand_ a proper apology, or-- oh, you're just _unbelievable! _How did you manage to function for three thousand years as a society of emotional cripples?"

"I think your definition of emotional cripple differs somewhat from mine," T'Laren said.

"Yes, yours can include anyone except for you. I'm perfectly willing to admit that in my own way I am crippled-- though frankly I think I'm a lot better described as a social cripple; I _have_ no problems expressing my emotions-- but you are not. In fact, it's your biggest problem, T'Laren. You're willing to go on and on about how I have all these problems, but what are you doing about your own?"

"It is _not your place_ to worry about my problems!" T'Laren said sharply. Her tone of voice was not one he'd ever heard from her-- controlled anger, deliberately released-- a tactic Picard had used often, but not something Q expected from a Vulcan. Q raised an eyebrow in surprise. T'Laren's usual reaction when she got angry was to go cold and totally Vulcan. This was something new. "Our relationship has never been reciprocal, Q. You are not my therapist, you are not qualified to _be_ my therapist, and I have not requested your help. So stay _out_ of my affairs."

"I seem to have hit a nerve."

"You seem to _have_ far more nerve than sense," T'Laren retorted. "Why are you trying to antagonize me? Are you so terrified of your own need for friendship that you must destroy the entire rapport we've created?"

"Make up your mind, T'Laren. One minute you're saying, 'No, we're not friends, I am your godlike psychologist and you must obey.' The next you're whining because I'm not being nice to you and I should play nice with my friends. Which is it?"

"I never claimed to be a godlike psychologist," she said, and half-smiled. "That honor belongs exclusively to your brother, I'm afraid."

"What, you trust _Lhoviri_ and not _me? _What are you, _insane?_"

"I was, when he found me," she said calmly.

"T'Laren, how many times do I have to tell you this? You _can't trust Lhoviri_. Do I need to tattoo it on your forehead or something? He's _me_, six million years down the road. He's a malicious and untrustworthy bastard-- _I know_. He hides it better than I did, but he's older than I am, too."

"So you're saying that you are a malicious and untrustworthy bastard, but I should trust you anyway?"

"_I_ don't have any powers. And yes. When I did, I was a malicious and untrustworthy bastard. I've learned a few things since, I think-- I hope-- and I'm _still_ capable of being malicious and untrustworthy, but I'm also enormously grateful to you. Lhoviri isn't. He has no motivation to do anything nice for anyone."

"So you never did anything nice for anyone. Even your fellow Q."

"I didn't say that--"

"You just did."

"Look, you just don't _know_ Lhoviri like I do!"

"Indeed. You knew him so well you expected that he would be one of your champions, until you discovered that he was responsible for your being thrown out of the Continuum."

Q drew in a sharp breath. "Cheap shot, T'Laren."

"I learned from the best," T'Laren said coolly.

Despite himself, Q smiled. "I seem to recall you had a talent for this the first time I met you," he said. "I didn't need to teach you much." He shook his head. "That's besides the point, though. You're right-- I thought I knew him, and he betrayed me. So obviously he's _worse_ than I thought he was."

"That doesn't follow. He might have betrayed you because he didn't have the cavalier attitude toward mortal lives that you had, and that you expect him to share. Or, as I've mentioned before, he might have betrayed you because he believed this was your last best chance for redemption. Either way, he has no particularly good reason to hurt me. And whether you want to accept it or not, Q, Lhoviri is responsible for my being here today. I owe him more than I am likely to be able to repay. I do _not_ trust him, and he understands that I do not, because if I allowed myself to begin thinking that Lhoviri is interested in my personal welfare I would probably end up worshipping him. But I have not have the experience of knowing him and caring about him for several millennia and then have him betray me, no. This doesn't speak volumes about your objectivity in the situation, however."

"Him saving your life doesn't speak volumes about _yours_, either."

"True. But Lhoviri is not the point, and we've become sidetracked. The point is that you are attempting to interfere in my life, to equalize the balance of power between us by trying to practice guerrilla psychotherapy on me. It's not your job."

"I never _said_ it was my _job_," Q said. "My _job_ is shooting down people's silly little theories. But you really are behaving like an idiot, you know."

"What business is it of yours if I choose to behave like an idiot?"

"Why _shouldn't_ it be my business?"

She sighed. "I have _explained_ why it is not your business. We're going around in circles again."

"Yes, circular arguments have always been the bane of our existence," he said lightly. It wasn't a terribly entertaining argument, either. T'Laren couldn't see how she was contradicting herself, and for once Q didn't feel like hashing it out with her. They weren't starting from the same reference point, he thought, and in order to get to the same reference point he was afraid he'd have to say too much. If T'Laren wasn't in a self-revelatory mood, he couldn't see why he should have to be the one to strip metaphorically nude. "Fine, I've got work to do anyway." He got up and headed for his room.

"You do realize that we haven't resolved anything?" T'Laren called after him.

"When do we ever?" he asked, and let the door to his room shut behind him.

* * *

T'Laren watched him go, somewhat disturbed. It wasn't at all like Q to simply stop arguing and retreat, circular argument or no. Perhaps he recognized for once that he was out of line... which wasn't like him either, but perhaps he was finally changing. If he'd thrown Sovaz up in her face just now just to be a jerk, he might well recognize what he was doing, and maybe even give in... but she'd gotten the distinct impression that that wasn't what it was, or not all it was anyway. Q seemed to genuinely believe he was helping-- and more than that, that he had the right to "help." It had to be a reciprocal power thing-- Q couldn't stand being in a less powerful position, and had to try to mirror her authority. Maybe he backed down because he recognized that was what he was doing, and that he had no moral high ground to argue from?

She wanted to discuss the case with Tris. It had been too long since she'd had a fellow therapist around to help spot her. Back when she practiced regularly, she would discuss cases in detail with fellow therapists on other ships or stations without using the patient's name, and since the others didn't know the patients personally they couldn't figure out who it was from the case description, either. It was unfortunate that Tris knew Q, since it raised the risk of violating patient-therapist confidentiality, but she couldn't think of anyone else she could talk to now, and she felt a serious lack of objectivity. She _had_ to talk to someone; she'd just be careful how much she said.

* * *

The holodeck simulated the botanical lounge aboard Starbase 199, itself a simulation of the Hanging Gardens of Guayaquil. Tris pointed this out as they entered the room. "I think this has to be the ultimate in removal from reality. You realize, this is a simulation of a recreation of a copy?"

A simulation of a recreation of a place home to neither of their species, T'Laren thought-- it was hard for her to think of Earth as home, anymore. Nevertheless, Starbase 199's botanical lounge had been important to both of them. "You know why I chose it."

"Every so often I wonder if holodecks generate some kind of long-term psychoses," Tris said. "The idea of something that looks real, sounds real, smells real-- and it's completely fake. And there's something very slightly _off_ about it, so you know it's not real, but it's too subtle to put your finger on why."

"I don't know what you mean. I can't tell the difference between a holodeck and reality unless there are artificial people in the simulation."

"And how do you tell the difference then?"

T'Laren shrugged. "I suppose it's my telepathy. I know when I'm in the presence of a sentient being, though I can't sense anything _about_ them unless I'm touching them."

"But you can't tell that you're not really in the Gardens right now?"

"Well, I know it logically, because I know I came onto a holodeck. But if I were unconscious and I woke up here, I'm not sure if I'd realize I was on a holodeck."

"See, I'd know. Not right away, but I would know." Tris picked a flower off a vine and handed it to her. "Look at it. It looks alive, it smells alive, but it's not. It's not even dead. It's imaginary, a construct of smoke and mirrors."

"A difference that makes no difference is no difference, Tris."

"But this difference _does_ make a difference." He sat down on the bench. "Maybe it's even more insidious if you really _can't_ sense it. What's the point to going on shore leave when you can have a much more positive experience on the holodeck? Simulate the planet without the annoying bugs to the funny gravity or the weird smells or the risk that some nutcase alien custom will get you killed. Why go home when you can replicate home on the holodeck? Why do _anything_ real?"

"Starfleet officers are screened for the potential for that particular psychosis," T'Laren said. "And holodecks were tested for years before they put them on starships."

"I know all that. I just wonder... oh well. I don't think you came here to talk about holodecks." He patted the bench next to him. "Why don't you sit down and stay a while."

T'Laren plucked another flower off the vine and twirled it in her fingers. "I need to be very careful in examining questions of reality and unreality," she said. "The point isn't a moot one for me anymore."

"Why not?"

No. She hadn't yet summoned the nerve to talk about that, though she wanted to, though she'd just tried to lead herself up to it. Tris would know nothing that could reassure her, and given his opinion of holodeck creations... mightn't he decide she wasn't real, a Q-created simulacrum of dead T'Laren? Bajorans took concepts like souls very seriously. "Actually," she said, "I'd like your input on my case. I'm not sure... I'm not sure I'm handling it professionally enough."

"Fine. Who's been your backup in this?"

For a silly moment, she thought he meant backup in the sense of substitute, and thought of Q's reaction to a substitute therapist. That wouldn't go over very well. A second later, she realized he must mean her therapist. People doing therapy were supposed to have fellow therapists they could talk to, to help them stay professional with their cases. She didn't quite think Lhoviri counted.

"I don't have backup."

"That's ridiculous. Are you kidding?" She shook her head. "Well, that's problem number one!"

"I didn't see a way around it at first. I had to get Q off Starbase 56. The counselor there had been completely intimidated by Q; he controlled almost every interaction they had. Everyone there despised him, and either avoided interacting or attacked first."

"I've heard they had reason," Tris said. "You know, they had a GIAC made up just for him?"

A GIAC-- Guidelines for Interacting with Alien Cultures-- was a memo members of Starfleet, and civilians in official Federation capacities such as scientists and diplomats-- were required to read before having dealings with the race in question. T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "He _is_ the only representative of his race in known space, but that seems a little extreme."

"He's driven people off in tears, provoked violent attacks against him, and apparently gave one guy a complete nervous breakdown. They should _never_ have assigned Medellin to him-- I've met her; she's an incredible wuss. Sometimes I wonder who she offended at Starfleet Command to draw _that_ particular assignment."

"She volunteered. Possibly out of some sort of identification with Q's plight; it's hard not to have sympathy for him if you just hear the facts of what's happened to him, without meeting him personally. Nian Medellin struck me as the sort of woman who would nursemaid the universe if given half a chance."

"Which is _not_ the sort of counselor a person given to whining self-pity ought to get. Q needed someone who could kick him in the butt."

"Whining self-pity?' T'Laren raised her eyebrow again. "An interesting description from someone who met Q only briefly, and that under circumstances in which he was _not_ whining or self-pitying."

"All right. I'll grant you I'm going mostly from second-hand descriptions. Why don't you describe what you're seeing?"

"I'm not totally sure." She sat down. "From studying everything I could get hold of on him before I actually met him, I hypothesized that the only treatable cause of his depression is the fact that he has no social safety nets. He really has been exiled to a life he can't stand; he really does have a hard time with what he perceives as his disability, in being merely mortal; he has a number of excellent reasons to be depressed, and there's nothing I can do about any of those. But he's also a very socially dependent individual, though he would never admit it in those terms. He postures for his audience, he performs, he puts on entire theatrical productions to get people to pay attention to him, or to view him a certain way, or to connect with him, even negatively. If he really didn't care what people thought of him, he wouldn't behave that way. So I've focused my attention on getting him to understand how badly he needs social connections, and to try to form positive ones instead of trying for negative attention."

"Okay." Tris watched her with his best sounding-board expression.

"Initially he was self-destructive-- and irresponsible with his own welfare, even when he wasn't actively being self-destructive-- to the point where I thought he needed someone to..." She hesitated. "More or less play dictator. Tell him what he should eat, force him to exercise, force him to get a decent night's sleep, that sort of thing."

"Play mommy, you mean."

"If you like. In a lot of ways Q is very childish-- not entirely his fault; by the standards of his people, according to him, he literally is an adolescent, and by our standards he's had only three years experience with a human body-- but he's been treated as an adult since he first became human. Which meant that people expected him to behave in his own self-interest, and when he didn't, rather than teaching him appropriate behavior or making allowances for adolescent temper tantrums, they tried to exert complete control over him. This didn't work very well. Q's reaction to other people trying to control him is to get extremely stubborn."

"So you decided to treat this person who doesn't respond well to authority by playing dictator."

T'Laren winced slightly. "I made a few missteps at first, but also I tried to change the parameters of my dictatorship. Rather than acting as if Q was maliciously trying to hurt himself to get back at me, I tried to behave as if I knew he was doing this because he didn't know any better, and show him why the response was an inappropriate one."

"You treated him like a kid, basically."

"In some ways, yes. And now I think he's developed enough ability to listen to advice without automatically going stubborn on me that I'm treating him like an adult again, and in some ways he resents it. He complained today that I didn't wake him up in time for his conference."

"Did you tell him you'd given up the mommy business?"

"I told him the night before that I was changing tactics... but I think I didn't make it clear that I was no longer acting in loco parentis before I let him oversleep, no. That was a mistake. I taught him to rely on me instead of taking responsibility himself and then I didn't warn him he'd have to switch back."

"Does Q know he's graduated to being a grownup again? For that matter, did he know why you were babying him in the first place?"

"I tried to make it clear."

"Because that's dangerous, being someone's parent. Q might be an adolescent, but his mommy and daddy are not here. They threw him out of the nest to take care of himself. You're not going to help him solve his problems by taking care of him."

"Little chance of that. Q sees himself as fiercely independent. He resents any attempt to take care of him."

"That wouldn't stop him from shamelessly taking advantage of it if you're going to do it anyway. It just means he'll resent you when you do it and he'll resent you when you stop."

This sounded uncomfortably close to what was happening. "You could be right. He's been obnoxious to me since we came aboard _Yamato._"

"You mean that isn't normal?"

She shook her head. "I think you've been overly influenced by people's stories about him, Tris. He actually behaved quite well at the conference-- no worse than anyone else there. In fact, I would consider Lt. Dhawan to have been far ruder than Q, considering that she is supposed to be the science officer of the host vessel."

"Well, that's Shara for you," Tris said, shaking his head. "Why _did_ you think we gave her job to Sovaz?"

"Why Sovaz?" T'Laren returned. "If you were looking for a person with social polish and diplomatic skills..."

"She doesn't do too badly," Tris said. "Besides, she makes everyone here feel good, the way she asks them questions constantly. Nothing to make a scientist feel like an expert than having a good-looking girl hanging on their every word; _they_ don't know Sovaz pumps everyone for information. Or how immature she is."

"Perhaps. My point being, though, that Q is not being that bad-- except to me. I'd thought we'd achieved something of an understanding aboard _Ketaya--_"

"And that's probably exactly why he's doing it," Tris said, interrupting. "T'Laren, come on. You should _know_ people do things like that. He probably feels like you've gotten too far under his skin, and now he needs to push you away, or something."

"That isn't the main thing," T'Laren said, shaking her head. It wasn't that simple. It couldn't be. "I could deal with mere obnoxiousness. But he seems to have taken it into his head that he needs to fix _my_ life."

"It does kind of look like someone needs to."

"Tris..."

"All right, all right. You have any idea why he might be doing something like that? I mean, from what I understand of him, fixing other people's lives is not exactly what he does."

"Yes. Nonetheless, he's doing it. At first I thought he was simply being maliciously amused; now I wonder if it's a power game of some sort. An attempt to compensate for my greater power as therapist by trying to play therapist to _me_."

"Well, why's he _say_ he's doing it? That's probably a clue."

"He says he's doing it because friends don't let friends dress like Vulcan schoolmarms."

"Okay... is that what he's attacking you on? The way you dress?"

"The way I dress, the way I behave to Sovaz, my relationship with you..."

"What's _he_ know about our relationship?"

"He overheard you calling yourself my _taran_."

Tris' eyes widened. "He knows the door trick?"

"Apparently." The words sank in. "What door trick, Tris?"

"The trick you use when you want to eavesdrop on somebody. I don't know whether to be pissed off or impressed. How much of our conversation did he hear?"

"As nearly as I could tell, the whole thing. He found it amusing."

"Yeah, I can see how he would," Tris said darkly. Then he shook it off. "All right. So you think maybe it's a power game. Sounds that way to me too, but is there anything else?"

"Well, there was something somewhat odd... Q doesn't simply quit arguments, most of the time. He allows them to become circular, he prolongs them, seemingly for the joy of arguing. But last night he... First he invited Sovaz to my quarters, then attempted to provoke her into attacking me. When I apologized to her and she accepted it, Q seemed to think that that wasn't enough-- that Sovaz should have extracted a pound of flesh for her troubles. After she left, we began to argue-- and then Q backed down, admitting the argument had become circular and claiming he had work to do. Normally he doesn't do that."

"Maybe he's learned circular arguments are boring?"

"I don't think he thinks they are. He revels in the stimulation of arguing; I've never before known him to back down unless he was either proven wrong or the topic moved onto an uncomfortable subject for him."

"Well, could _that_ be what happened? What were you arguing about when he backed down?"

T'Laren summoned up her memory of the conversation and summarized it, excluding the tangent about Lhoviri. Tris' stare became more intent as she spoke. When she finished, he said, "I suggest you get out now."

"What?"

"I mean it. I think you're getting way too emotionally involved. I mean, I wasn't there, but it sounds to me like if Q even _thinks_ you're playing 'I-am-the-almighty-therapist' power games on him one minute and then whining because he should play nice with his friends-- unless it's total bullshit that he made up for effect, it means you're in too deep. First you tell me you've been playing mommy. Now he seems to think you're playing friend, and you shouldn't be _playing_ anything."

"I'm not."

"You sure about that?" Tris stood and began to pace. "Listen, you were on a spaceship for two weeks with him."

"Three."

"Three, then. That's worse. People in that kind of proximity either get forced together or pushed apart, and either way you wouldn't be able to help him. _Look_ at yourself, T'Laren. You're upset because your patient is attacking your personal life. Why do you care? Is it because you feel he's backslid and you want to see him do better? But you _know_ people do this kind of thing, try to put distance between them and their therapist when they think stuff's cut too close to home. Are you _sure_ it isn't because it personally bugs _you? _That you've gotten in deep enough that you _care_ what he thinks?"

"I have hardly heard it said that a good therapist is uncaring."

Tris let out an exasperated sigh. "You're not _listening_ to me. Sure, you should care about what he thinks of you-- for _his_ sake. Making fun of your clothes and the way you treat your sister-- which, by the way, I'm totally behind him on-- doesn't mean he's lost his trust in you or his respect for you. It _does_ mean he doesn't think you're the Prophets, or Mommy, but you're not supposed to be, so that's just as well. And it _also_ does mean that if you've started to get emotionally involved, you could get emotionally hurt. And if you even start to give me that crap about not having emotions, I _will_ smack you."

"I wasn't planning on it." Her world took an odd lurch to the side. Had she gotten too emotionally involved? Could she do anything about it if she was? She knew herself to be somewhat obsessed with Q, but that what Lhoviri was paying for. Was that getting in her way? There was a difference between getting too emotionally involved to avoid getting hurt and too emotionally involved to do Q any good. What if the latter had happened? "I don't believe I'm too involved to help him," she said calmly, hoping it was true. "And I'm afraid there are no other considerations."

Tris stared at her. She had just said it was okay to break one of the cardinal rules of therapy, she knew-- Thou Shalt Not Get Involved. "Let's assume for the sake of argument that you're right, and you being too involved _isn't_ going to get him hurt or ruin any attempt to do therapy, even though that's _usually_ what happens when therapists get personally involved. Why is your happiness less important than his? Why are you going to take the risk of having an emotional leech attached to you?"

"Q's hardly an emotional leech. You don't know him."

"Maybe not, but he's a disaster waiting to happen. That, I do know." He stared at her as if a horrible thought had just occurred to him. "You're not in love with him, are you?"

T'Laren blinked, somewhat stunned at the irrelevancy of the question. "No." She shook her head slightly. "Where do these notions _come _from, Tris? Must you always bring sex into everything?"

"I didn't bring in sex. I brought in love. You of all people know there's a difference. And for that matter, even if I _was_ just talking about sex, it's hardly that weird. You have a bad habit of falling for self-centered, arrogant assholes with emotional problems."

She let her face soften slightly. "Present company included, of course?..."

"Oh, of course. But all right. You're not in love with him. Good, I don't have to pretend I don't know you."

Her eyes narrowed. "Tris, are you jealous?"

"What?" The flat, disbelieving tone in his voice was the exact equivalent, for him, of her blinking before.

"You have spent a good portion of this conversation sniping at Q. You know him only by reputation, yet you seem to feel free to attack him. You have raised the possibility that I am in love with him. And I don't believe what passed between us was ever adequately resolved. So I ask, reasonably, are you jealous?"

"_No_, I'm not jealous," he snapped, and then some of the anger drained from his face. "You just got out of a relationship with one emotional cripple, T'Laren. If I thought you were getting into a relationship with another-- and if Q's as badly off as I've heard, he makes Soram look like Mr. Sensitivity-- I'd be really concerned for you. Not to mention disappointed. I'd like to _think_ you're not the sort who gravitates to men who are really incredibly lousy for you."

She touched his arm, gently. "If I was, it would provide additional explanation for why I left you."

"I doubt it." He took the hand that was on his arm, covered it as he sat down with her. "Why _did_ you leave, T'Laren? You never really explained."

"I said I wasn't willing to give up being Vulcan. I thought you understood."

"And loving a Bajoran somehow compromises your Vulcanness? Funny, you guys do it with humans all the time and no one kicks them out of the Vulcan Sibhood."

"It wasn't loving a Bajoran that threatened my Vulcan citizenship. It was loving him enough to contemplate leaving my husband for him."

Tris nodded, as if he should have known-- which, indeed, he should have. She had explained to him once that divorce was impossible. "So how come he could ditch you?"

"Because I was insane."

"Seems like a shit of a double standard," he said, his voice dark with anger against all those who had hurt her, his face very close to hers.

T'Laren was abruptly uncomfortably conscious of his proximity. Tris might try to kiss her, she thought, considering that she was free now, and that the chains of bonding were the only reason she had left him in the first place. But she had other chains now, obligations she needed to fulfill. She stood up, breaking the moment. "I'm sorry. I wish there had been another way, then."

"But what's done is done, huh?" He shrugged slightly. "Okay. If that's how you want it."

"It is less a question of what I want than what must be," she said softly. "I have obligations to fulfill before I can even consider fixing the wreck of my personal life."

"Obligations to Q?" He shook his head. "I always knew you could get fairly obsessive about what you think your duties are, but you know you're pushing it now, don't you?"

"I owe a debt, Tris. One I can never fully repay."

"To _Q?_"

"To the one that asked me to help Q. I cannot consider quitting until I am sure either that Q no longer needs me-- that he has developed enough of a safety net of friendships with others that they can carry him when things get bad-- or that I am doing more harm than good. I owe too much to do otherwise."

"Are you sure you'll know it when he doesn't need you anymore?" Tris asked. "Or especially when you're starting to do more harm than good?"

Before she could answer, his combadge bleeped. Tris rolled his eyes and touched it. "Tris here."

Wilde's voice over the intercom said, "Professor Yalit is transporting aboard at Transporter Room 3. You should be there."

"Right. How long?"

"About five minutes-- if you're not in dress uniform, don't worry about it. This is going to be... interesting, Tris."

"Interesting how?"

"Apparently she's a Ferengi."

T'Laren's eyebrows went up. "A _female_ Ferengi physicist?"

"You're right. 'Interesting' sounds like an understatement. I'll be there." Tris toggled his combadge off and looked at T'Laren. "Now this I gotta see."

* * *

The second day of the conference had been even more entertaining than the first. Q had gotten a chance to utterly demolish three other theorists, including the incredibly idiotic Dr. Pergiun, whose presence at the conference assured Q that whatever criteria they'd used to invite the guests, value to Federation science was _not_ it. One of the others he'd demolished was Elejani Baíi. He'd taken a special delight when he'd seen that opportunity; the Laon'l were almost religiously non-confrontational, and he had more or less expected her to metaphorically curl up in a ball and whimper. After the way she had publicly humiliated him at the reception, the thought of destroying her theories in a public arena took on a special savor. He hadn't gotten quite what he'd expected from her, though; she had debated with him for a bit, calmly, and then when it became blatantly obvious that he was right she'd graciously backed down and thanked him for his insights. That had been mildly annoying, but at least the unpredictability of it had been marginally amusing. But now he was getting restless.

Dhawan and Tamal, the Cardassian woman, had been in a shouting match for the past ten minutes, with one of the human scientists, a man named Sinclair, desperately trying to get them to calm down, and several other people, Q included, egging them on, when Sovaz' combadge bleeped at her. Sovaz answered it, making no attempt to conceal the conversation from the delegates. "Sovaz here."

"... obvious bankruptcy of Federation science..."

"Sovaz, Yalit is boarding. You should come on down."

"... at least we don't decide what theories the State will allow to be published in some sort of secret star chamber..."

"On my way," Sovaz said.

As she stood up, Dhawan broke off her tirade against Cardassian science and turned. "Sovaz, where are you going?"

"Professor Yalit is arriving," Sovaz announced.

Q had been watching Sovaz, having grown somewhat tired of Dhawan and Tamal rehashing their arguments. He raised an eyebrow at that. "You _must_ invite us along, Sovaz. I confess to an overwhelming desire to meet our mystery alien."

"I doubt Commander Wilde would appreciate it if I--"

"Oh, come now. Surely he couldn't object to a delegation of Yalit's colleagues and fellow scholars coming to greet her?" Actually Q was less interested in meeting Yalit-- though he _was_ curious as to what her race was, and how he'd managed to never hear of someone important enough in the field to warrant an invite her-- as he was in getting out of the room.

"Don't be an idiot, Lucy," Markow said. "Of course he could. He's Starfleet."

"I don't understand," Sovaz said.

"Just as well," Q replied, getting up. Dhawan glared at him.

"She just said you're not invited, mister."

"Perhaps I should stay here, then, and attack the political beliefs of the other guests? Oh, but I suppose Starfleet frowns less on that than on a delegation of scientists greeting a fellow."

"There's nothing against Starfleet policy in that," Roth said. "I'm _quite_ sure of it. Let's all go!"

"A wonderful notion," Tamal said. "Perhaps we could demonstrate that one need not be a member of Starfleet to show hospitality." She shot a look at Dhawan.

"I'm going to be late," Sovaz said, trying to push her way past Q without actually invading his space, difficult because he kept shifting his body weight so she couldn't get past.

"Truly a tragedy. I hear they frown on that in Starfleet."

In the end some others took pity on Sovaz, and managed matters so that only Q and Roth ended up leaving with her. Sovaz looked mildly bewildered; Q wondered if he should feel guilty for pressuring someone so obviously clueless about humanoid interactions into something she didn't want to do, and decided that regardless of whether he _should_, he wasn't going to. Guilt was for lesser beings, and besides, this promised to be entertaining.

* * *

It was not Derek Wilde's day.

Truth be told, it hadn't been his week; but he had so far at least managed to greet all the incoming VIPs without mortally offending any of them. That might conceivably have changed.

Fifteen minutes ago he had been on the bridge when a report of an incoming ship came in. A Ferengi ship. Since there were no Ferengi delegates-- since the death of Dr. Reyga, there were no Ferengi physicists of any renown-- this was unexpected, but then, Ferengi would ferry people if the passengers paid them enough. Captain Okita had hailed them, and their DaiMon, a man named Dar, had replied, in that sort of smarmy, not-quite-insulting way that Ferengi had, that they were bringing the Lady Yalit to the conference.

That had been all right. When they had demanded to accompany her, Wilde had demanded to know why, whereupon Dar had informed him that the Lady Yalit was his mother.

At this point Wilde's jaw had dropped to the floor, and he'd said, "Yalit is a _Ferengi?_"

What he'd _meant_ was that she was a Ferengi female, and _he_ had been under the impression that females weren't allowed to read, let alone become great physicists of interplanetary renown. DaiMon Dar had not taken it quite that way. After about ten minutes of trying to apologize and explain that of _course_ he didn't mean Ferengi couldn't be great scientists, everyone knew they could, hadn't Dr. Reyga invented the metaphasic shield? and so forth, he had heard an imperious voice from off screen telling Dar to shut up and make boarding arrangements. An imperious, aged and very definitely female voice.

God but he hoped she was waiving the "no clothes" rule. That was all he needed.

And now, as he waited in the transporter room, while Yalit and her family entourage were being fashionably late, Sovaz came in with Q and one of the Starfleet delegates. Of all people. Wilde groaned inwardly.

"Mr. Sovaz, what are the civilians doing here?"

Roth blinked. "Commander, with all due respect, exactly when did I become a civilian?"

"They wished to pay their respects to Dr. Yalit," Sovaz said, naively sincere.

_Here's a few credits, Sovaz. Buy a clue. _"Well, that's very admirable of them, but they really aren't supposed to be here."

"Why not?" Q asked.

"Because it's policy," Wilde answered in total desperation.

Q looked to Roth. "You're in Starfleet, Harry. You ever hear of a policy like that?"

"Never did," Roth said. "Sir, what chapter and subsection of the regulations is that policy?"

At that point Tris came in, with another civilian. The Vulcan who'd been so rude to Sovaz. _Just_ what Wilde needed.

He was about to use the fact that Roth _was _Starfleet to order him to leave and take his civilian buddies with him, when the transporter chief spoke. "Yalit's party is ready for transport," she said.

Wilde sighed. He could order Roth to leave, but getting Q to go would be a major headache-- the man had a reputation for doing whatever you told him not to do. And after he'd offended the DaiMon, he really didn't want to keep Yalit's party waiting. "Energize," he said tiredly.

Four columns of sparking light appeared on the platform. As they formed with more precision, Wilde fought to keep from moaning. Three of them were fairly average-looking Ferengi, with the funny little hatlike things hanging from the backs of their heads, wearing loud clothes as Ferengi were wont to do. The fourth, in the middle, was wearing earrings dangling from small, droopy earlobes, and otherwise was completely naked.

"I think I am about to lose my lunch," Q said, quietly, but probably not quietly enough.

Wilde stepped forward, smiling. "Welcome to the _Yamato_, Professor Yalit--" The three male Ferengi glared at him.

"Our _mother_ will not _speak_ to strange men," one of the three, not the DaiMon, said sharply.

How the hell was she going to be at the conference if she didn't talk? And what were they going to do about the fact that Starfleet regulations clearly stated that all humanoids should wear clothing that concealed the genitalia while aboard a Starfleet vessel? Outdated, but there it was. Yalit looked at her son with a touch of incredulity, as if she couldn't believe he was bothering to make a big deal.

"All right," Wilde said, controlling his urge to scream at the Ferengi. "Lieutenant?"

Sovaz stepped forward. "Welcome to the _Yamato_, Professor Yalit," she said promptly. "I'm Lieutenant Sovaz, science department liaison to the conference. May I show you to your quarters?"

Yalit laughed. "Don't mind my sons. They're far too overprotective of their old mother." She turned to the errant son.! "Ril! How am I supposed to speak at the conference if I can't speak to men, eh?" With that she whacked him on the side of the head.

"I feel positively nauseous," Q murmured.

"This was your idea," Roth whispered. He wasn't being quiet enough, either.

"So who are you?" Yalit peered up at Wilde, who was now somewhat confused by the interplay between the Ferengi. "You the captain?"

"No, I'm Commander Derek Wilde, first officer."

"I don't rate the captain, hmm?"

"The captain didn't come to see any of us," Roth piped up. He stepped forward. "How do you do? I'm Dr. Harry Roth, one of your fellow inmates."

"Why is it that she gets to run around in the altogether, when _I_ was forced to put on clothing aboard the _Enterprise_ because of some silly Starfleet regulation?" Q asked. "Have they actually done something sensible and changed the regulations, or is this rampant discrimination against members of the Q Continuum in favor of Ferengi?"

T'Laren said warningly, "Q..."

"Fine," Tris said. "Take off _your_ clothes if it would make you feel better."

"It certainly would be less nauseating to look at if I did," Q said.

"Is that true?" Yalit asked. "There's a Starfleet regulation that says I have to wear clothes?"

"Mother! You can't be thinking of _degrading_ yourself like that-- _denying_ your womanhood--"

"You don't have to wear clothes if you don't want to," Tris said. "It's a Prime Directive thing, isn't it?" He turned to Wilde, who nodded gratefully.

"Then why did _I_ have to wear clothes?" Q asked.

"Because _you_ don't come from a society where nudity's the norm," Tris said. "So no one was violating your cultural beliefs."

"Yes, but they made me wear a hideous color. That _does_ violate my cultural beliefs."

"Q, be quiet," T'Laren said.

"Mother, these men are _not_ paying you the respect you deserve--"

"Shut _up_, Ril." Yalit yanked on Wilde's tunic, hard. He turned back, startled. "Is it going to hamper my ability to attend the conference if I don't wear clothes?"

"Terribly," Q said. "Everybody will be too busy vomiting to listen to your undoubtedly silly theories."

Tris turned around. "Q, either shut up or get out," he said.

"Let him talk," Yalit said. She stepped off the transporter platform and over to Q, glaring up at him.

It was a bizarre confrontation. Yalit barely came up to Q's waist-- a tiny, wizened, troll-like woman with sagging skin covered with liver spots and narrow, piggy eyes, facing off against a tall, frighteningly thin, sardonic human man whose attire was the picture of sartorial elegance. Yalit seemed almost a monster, a Baba Yaga from ancient tales, not a sentient being at all. "What's your name?" she demanded.

Q looked down at her as if she were an offensive bit of debris he had found on his shoe. "I am Q," he said coldly.

"Why haven't I ever heard of you?"

"I travel in far more refined circles than you do, apparently," Q said.

"You've got a nasty tongue on you, young man. Better be careful. Someone might cut it out."

"'Young man?'" Q raised an eyebrow. "I suppose that in this current body I _would_ have to admit to the man part, but young is hardly an appropriate term for me."

"Compared to me? You're a baby."

Q snorted. "I _hardly_ think so. I was old when your people were first crawling out of the sludge-- girlie."

"You look it," Yalit said, nodding. Peremptorily she turned to her sons. "Get me a robe! Now!"

"Mother! You can't seriously be--"

The DaiMon glared at his brother. "The Lady Yalit gave you an _order_, Ril," he said sharply. "Get her a robe!"

"I'd suggest one with a hood, myself," Q said, "Preferably one that goes over the entire head."

Yalit turned back to him. "You think you're so wonderful, young man-- excuse me, _old_ man? A woman would _cut_ herself on those bones of yours."

Q shrugged. "I'm thin. But I can gain weight. You, my dear, are ugly-- and _nothing_ can change that."

T'Laren grabbed Q. "I think that's quite enough," she said. "Come on." She started dragging him toward the door.

Yalit cackled. "Not only is he skinny and ill-mannered, but he takes _orders_ from _women!_" Her sons laughed appreciatingly.

Q turned at the door and smiled. "Like your sons, you mean?"

And then, as the male Ferengi purpled and Yalit glared, he was gone.

"You'll have to forgive us," Wilde said, filled with dread. He had handled this all wrong. He had been practically paralyzed by the interplay between Q and the woman. "Q is one of the other delegates, _not_ someone Starfleet has any control over. He behaves that way to everybody."

"Does his girlfriend drag him out of the room every time he does it?" Yalit asked, and then cackled again.

The Ferengi that hadn't spoken so far stepped off the transporter platform with a loud greenish plaid robe, far too big for Yalit, but she put it on. "When you're with aliens, follow their custom if you want their latinum," Yalit told her sons. "Rule of Acquisition number 203."

"I can show you to your quarters now," Sovaz suggested.

"The _Lady Yalit_ will not be _guided_ by a _female underling!_" Ril shouted.

Sovaz blinked. "Professor Yalit is female. How does it impugn her honor to be guided by a fellow female? I don't see the logic."

"That's because there isn't any," Yalit said. "One more _word_ out of you, Ril, and I'll send you back to the ship. You're almost as ill-mannered as that fellow Gyu."

"Q, actually," Sovaz said.

"Whatever. Take me to my room, child. No one has _any_ manners these days."

"What did you think you were doing?" T'Laren asked, barely managing to keep her anger out of her voice.

Q shrugged. "Merely greeting a fellow scholar."

"No. That is not what you were doing. It is undoubtedly not what you think you were doing, either."

"The keenly observant Vulcan telepath strikes again! Tell me, what other facts have you gleaned from your mind-reading expeditions, T'Laren? What else do you know that I don't about my own thoughts?"

"One hardly needs to be a telepath. One merely needs to look." She pulled him around the corner and released him when she saw people coming; despite her anger, she had no particular desire to humiliate Q further by dragging him past various members of the crew.

"Then why don't _you_ tell me what I was doing, since you seem to know so much about it?" he asked cheerily, obviously enjoying the argument.

"Why was it necessary to humiliate Professor Yalit like that?"

"She was asking for it," Q said. "I mean, really, how much temptation do you expect me to be able to withstand?"

"Is this more of your bigotry?" T'Laren asked quietly. "For one so supposedly knowledgeable, you display an appalling close-mindedness on occasion."

Q removed his guest combadge and dropped it on the floor. He glanced down at it. "Hmm. It seems the laws of gravity are still working today!" He bent at the knees to pick it up and looked up at her with a mocking expression in his eyes. "One wouldn't want to be close-minded about such things."

"Considering that most of your insults revolved around the professor's supposed ugliness--"

"It's true. Humans will think she's ugly. So will Bajorans, Cardassians, Klingons, Betazoids, Andorians, and nearly anyone else one could mention, at least as far as races at this tinpot conference go."

"But how is that relevant? Professor Markow is hardly very attractive, for reasons far better under his control than Yalit's species is under hers. Yet you don't insult _him_."

"I don't _need_ to insult him any more."

"Any more?"

"What, is there an echo in here?"

They arrived back at their quarters-- which was interesting, because T'Laren hadn't actually intended to come here. Q was officially still supposed to be at the conference. Right now, though, she was on the trail of something. "Did you ever need to insult him?"

Q rolled his eyes. "I suppose you think that I really did think your accent is the most hilarious thing I ever heard, too."

The non sequitur puzzled T'Laren. "What does my accent have to do with anything?"

With a disgusted snort, Q walked over to the replicator. "Children's alphabet blocks. In bright primary colors."

As T'Laren watched, bemused, Q turned around with an armful of alphabet blocks and set them down on the table. "This is a C. See the C? _Pretty_ C." He set the C block down. "And this is an _A_. Can you say, A?"

"I hardly think you are in any position to accuse _me_ of being infantile," T'Laren said.

"Oh, I wouldn't think of accusing you of being infantile, my dear. I'm accusing you of being _stupid_."

T'Laren controlled a sigh of exasperation. She had no desire to play Q's games. On the other hand, she would lose his respect if he thought her stupid, and while most of what he was saying sounded like the usual Q smoke and mirrors, the hardness that edged into his voice on the word "stupid" made her think that he was on the verge of meaning it seriously.

She quickly reran the conversation in her head. Alphabet blocks weren't just a symbol of childhood; he was telling her she needed things spelled out, and that he was contemptuous of her for it. So what was it that he was refusing to spell out? Obviously he believed he had told her everything she needed to know...

"You attack people when you meet them for the first time. Because you're testing them for something. What?"

"Very _good_," Q said, placing a T block down next to the C and A with a flourish. "Maybe next we can learn our multiplication tables."

"What are you testing them for?" T'Laren repeated.

"Or maybe not," Q said. He leaned forward. "The truly obnoxious thing about you is that you seem to need to have everything spelled out. And if I won't do it you insist on doing it for me. Really, you have no class whatsoever."

"Fortunately," T'Laren said dryly, "I come from a classless society."

Q's eyes widened. "I think you just tried to make a joke. Careful. You could strain yourself."

"I do need to have things spelled out for me," T'Laren said. "And when you won't do it, I do need to reflect what you just said back to you. That's part of a therapist's job. I cannot take it for granted that I know what you mean-- that breeds misunderstanding and anger."

"And what a tragedy that would be," Q said.

"Besides, if I tell you what I think you mean, and it is _not_ what you mean, you will either get exasperated, or you will seize on my interpretation and confirm it to cover your own fears of being exposed."

"I can do _that_ anytime. I hardly need your help."

"Considering that you seem to dislike directly lying to me, it would seem to be much easier for you to do it when I help. I can usually persuade you to tell the truth if I don't ask you leading questions."

"And how do you know I'm telling the truth?"

"I don't. I believe you are, since your statements have an internal consistency, but I do not take any of my beliefs for granted. Which is why, although I believe I know the answer, I will ask again: why do you test people when you first meet them? What are you testing them for?"

"To see if they're worth my time." Q picked up one of the blocks and began off-handedly tossing it up into the air and catching it again, not looking at her.

T'Laren nodded slowly. "Did you decide Morakh was worth your time, when he refused to be provoked by you?"

"No, I decided he was worth making fun of back on Starbase 56. See, there's two kinds of people who are worth my time. There are people who are actually interesting, and then there are people who are fun to make fun of. So far Morakh _still_ falls in the second category; he's too stupid to be interesting any other way."

"You are going to get badly hurt one of these days. You were fortunate with Morakh, that he isn't as easily provoked as a typical Klingon. Someday you're going to push someone too far, and they're going to push back. Possibly with their fists."

Q shrugged. "I get beaten up all the time. If I was going to live in terror of being hurt, I would crawl under my bed and whimper until I died."

The remark was too offhanded, too studiedly casual. T'Laren pounced on it. "You believe you have no control over being hurt? That it's going to happen anyway, and so you may as well do as you like?"

He turned and stared at her. "I thought you just said you couldn't go about making things up that I supposedly think."

"For one who prides himself on his ability to deceive, your body language can be remarkably transparent at times," T'Laren said. "I'm right, aren't I? You don't think you have any control over being hurt, so you don't bother to exert what little control you actually do have." Something else fell into place. "That's why you don't fight back, why you think of yourself as powerless and weak, even though you would be a reasonably strong human if you took care of yourself. You're so powerless, compared to what you were before, that it seems to you that you have no power at all. And you don't want to learn self-defense techniques because you're so firmly convinced that you're powerless and the effort would be useless that you feel certain of failure, and you despise failing at anything. You would rather simply not try."

"I think this is one of your fairy tales again. We can chalk it up there along with 'I hate myself' and 'I tried to kill myself because I don't have any friends.'"

"You decided on _Ketaya_ that you did not, in fact, want to kill yourself. Exactly what was different about your life between then and the last time you were on Starbase 56?"

"I no longer had to deal on a daily basis with crushing idiocy, Anderson jerking me around like a puppet and Medellin's moronic sappiness."

"So you wanted to kill yourself because Counselor Medellin is sappy and Commodore Anderson kept taking away your computer privileges. I see. Such terrible things could devastate _anyone's_ existence."

Q glowered at her. "Vulcans aren't cut out for sarcasm."

"You only resort to bigotry when you know I'm right."

"_You_ pull statements out of thin air when I score a point."

"Did you score a point? I hadn't noticed."

"Why is it that you weren't capable of speculating on why I test people, but you were perfectly capable of making up a tale about why I tried to kill myself out of whole cloth? This seems remarkably inconsistent of you, T'Laren. Make up your mind."

"Make up _your_ mind. One moment you are deriding me for stupidity because I haven't played your guessing game. The moment I start playing and winning, you decide you would rather have had me keep my mouth shut. Are you that terrified of losing?"

"I wasn't aware that therapists were supposed to play games with their patients."

"When the patient will respond to nothing else, we're perfectly capable. And you seem incapable of relating to anyone outside the context of a game or a test." She stepped closer to him, getting in his space, staring intensely up at him. "Tell me, Q, doesn't that seem a little limited to you? To be incapable of saying what you truly mean, asking for what you really want, getting what you really need, because you're boxed in by the rules of a game that no one else is playing? You may take points off their score when they don't cooperate, but you can be sure that they're scoring _you_ poorly for refusing to engage in the social interactions _they_ expect. And there are far more of them than there are of you, and they have far more power than you do, and whether you like it or not, you depend on them for everything that makes your life marginally bearable. Didn't it ever occur to you that it's foolish to play a game if no one else will play with you?"

"You've turned quite vicious," Q said. "Don't like being on a ship with people who remember how you cracked up, do you?"

Abruptly T'Laren realized what she was doing. She had come perilously close to a personal attack, and when you attacked people they got far too defensive to listen to what you were saying. Not to mention that Q in particular could turn very vicious if pushed too far; and he had far too keen a sense for people's weaknesses to have entirely missed hers, especially when she'd been so obvious about them. She had made her point; it was time to back off and let it sink in. She composed herself serenely. "Think about it," she said, and turned away, walking to her bedroom.

* * *

T'Laren was seriously starting to annoy Q.

He sat at his terminal, looking up the minutes of the conference-- which he hadn't particularly felt like returning to after leaving it today, but he needed to know what silly theories other people had proposed, and more importantly what analyses they'd ordered run, so he knew what he had to work with-- and attempting, as usual, to figure out what exactly was causing the singularity. The idea that someone else might figure it out before he did drove him, as did the thought of the enjoyment he'd get from being the only one who knew the answer all the others were struggling to get. Right now he was having a hard time concentrating, though.

T'Laren was supposed to be on _his_ side. She was _not_ supposed to bodily drag him out of the room when she disapproved of his behavior. At the time he had still been "up" from the incident with Yalit, and had managed to ignore the indignity in favor of making it look like it hadn't bothered him. But now it angered him. She had been behaving badly to him ever since they got here-- forgetting to wake him up, forgetting to _tell_ him she wasn't going to wake him up, making eyes at her Bajoran boyfriend instead of doing her job and staying with him. And being cruel to her little sister, who Q was quite certain did not deserve such treatment-- making fun of the girl was one thing, he would enjoy that himself, but betraying her, cutting her down in public like that... well, Q had no sympathy for older siblings who betrayed the younger ones that looked up to them. Sovaz' naiveté begged for practical jokes and witty but lighthearted insults, not coldness. And then acting like he had no right to support the girl, or to tell T'Laren what a putz she was being, because she was his Almighty Therapist. Who _did_ she think she was?

From a distance, he heard the door chime, but he had no particular desire to get up and get it. It was probably Sovaz. Good. Let T'Laren face the girl, it would do her good.

Then there was a chime at _his_ door, and T'Laren's voice over the intercom. "Q? Dr. Roth is here to see you."

Q blinked in surprise. He didn't actually expect Harry to show up at his _room_. Q had had a long-standing policy of not letting anyone come into his personal quarters, aside from Anderson, who he couldn't really stop; ever since Dr. n'Vala's head had been broken in for seeing an assassin in the process of killing Q, Q had maintained a distance between his off-duty life and what he thought of as being "on", being in public. Roth, like everyone but T'Laren, belonged to his public life. What was he doing _here?_

"Let him in," Q said, curious. And, if the truth be told, he wanted something else to do. His work was not providing sufficient distraction from his anger at T'Laren's incredible density and recent coldness.

The door opened. "Hard at work, I see," Roth said cheerily. "Such dedication."

"If I am forced to live with you people, my superior intellect obligates me to attempt to guide you from the ignorance and foolishness that is your natural lot in life," Q said, sighing deeply. "A tedious, tedious job, but _someone_ must."

"How fortunate for us that that someone was you," Roth said. "A lesser man might have given up such a Herculean task, but not our Q! Gamely you struggle onward to bring light to the masses, overworked and underappreciated."

"Exactly."

"Well, as a token of our appreciation for your noble efforts in our behalf, I've come to invite you to dinner."

Q blinked. This was startling. "Whatever for?"

"Because I thought you might enjoy it, why else? Or do you really prefer to stay in this stodgy little room?" Harry looked around it. "Your quarters back home had _far_ more class."

"Quite possibly because I lived there. Hardly a point to redecorating when you'll be gone in a week or so. But you're quite right, Starfleet decor is abysmal."

"An oxymoron, even," Roth said, leaning forward. "Not that Ten-Forward is all _that_ much of an improvement, but we could sit in the back and make fun of people if you liked."

Q considered the offer. He was not stupid; he knew perfectly well why Harry Roth was making overtures to him, and knew it had nothing to do with anything truly of him and everything to do with an irrational hormonal reaction to Q's arbitrarily chosen form. Back when they were working desperately to stop the Borg, when he was new to the station and humanity and when the incident with Amy Frasier was a recent raw wound, he had ignored Roth's overtures of friendship until the man had stopped making them. He wasn't entirely sure why Harry was making them again now, but he felt considerably more tolerant of them; it felt good to have someone interested in him, someone who thought he was attractive and wanted to be with him, even if it was for one of those disgusting and meaningless physical reasons. And Roth _was_ an entertaining enough conversational partner, and having someone to trade witty banter with would get his mind off the events of the day and out of the downward spiral it was on. "Well, when you put it that way, how can I refuse?"

"Delightful!" Harry beamed at him. "So, shall we go?"

"Like _this?_" Q glanced down at himself. The clothing he'd worn to the conference today, like all his best outfits, had been restrictive and uncomfortable, designed as it was to make him look about 10% bulkier and considerably more muscular than his actual skeletal form. But he'd changed out of it when he came home, and while what he was wearing was flattering enough for entertaining room guests, and considerably more comfortable, it was insufficiently deceptive to be seen in public in. "No no no. I need to get dressed. Shoo." He flicked his fingers at Harry, gesturing at the door.

"Not necessary at all," Harry protested. "You're a vision of loveliness, believe me."

Q sighed. "I can't believe I've agreed to spend time in the company of a man with no taste whatsoever."

"We'll have to do something about this self-esteem problem, Q," Roth said cheerily. "It might actually fool people into thinking you don't think you're perfect."

"Of course I'm perfect. When I'm dressed. If We had intended you people to look attractive without clothes to help out, We wouldn't have removed your fur. Now get."

"Ah! So _you're_ taking credit for it."

"Well, not me personally. I was invited to be on the committee, but I declined. I thought, with remarkable prescience, that you'd be more trouble than you're worth. Now _will_ you get out and let me get dressed, or will I have to call in my muscle woman to remove you?" Q was having a great deal of fun. He really should have allowed this a long time ago.

"Is this going to be one of those three-hour ordeals?"

"The longer you stay and keep me from starting, the longer it gets."

Harry sighed ostentatiously. "Well, if you're going to be _that_ way about it, I suppose I can wait." He left the room and stood for a moment in the doorway, looking back. "I shall be waiting patiently."

"Good for you, Harry," Q said. "Patience is definitely a virtue you should cultivate."

It actually took Q only half an hour to get ready-- mostly because his makeup was already on and needed only to be freshened a bit. He selected a black suit with royal blue accents fairly quickly, since he'd had it in reserve in his "wear soon" area, and the physical process of dressing always took the least amount of time. As he stepped out into the common room of the suite, Harry, seated on the couch, raised his eyebrows appreciatively. "Oh, definitely worth the wait."

Q smiled, accepting that as his due from his adoring public. T'Laren, sitting in the armchair across from Harry, looked up at him as Harry stood. "Do you wish me to accompany you?"

Deliberately and with malicious glee, Q pronounced, "No." The effect was somewhat lost when T'Laren merely nodded and went back to reading, as if the request had merely been pro forma and she hadn't wanted to go in the first place.

As he and Roth left and the suite door shut behind them, Harry asked, "Did you two have a fight?"

"A 'fight' would imply I was dealing with someone of sufficient intellect to present a challenge," Q said coldly, the cold directed more at the thought of T'Laren than at Harry. "I hardly think T'Laren qualifies."

"I don't know; she seems to have helped you a lot. You seem a lot happier."

Q did not want to discuss T'Laren, or what she had done for him. "That's merely a function of finally getting the respect and attention I deserve."

"What about the fact that you have more people in one place to annoy than ever before since the Borg?" Harry asked innocently. "Does that play a role?"

Q pretended to think about it. "Mmm... I'd say that it's a definite factor, yes."

This was fun. He couldn't remember ever being invited to dinner before, or actually to any social function that didn't by necessity include him, like the victory party when they defeated the Borg. And while he might once have been nervous at Harry's ulterior motives, he felt himself now to be completely safe-- his body was in no danger of betraying him here. It had no physical interest in Roth, leaving Q free to banter and enjoy the man's company without any fear that his body would try to make him do something else.

The Ten-Forward lounge aboard the _Yamato_ was not nearly as dark and somber as the Ten-Forward lounge aboard the _Enterprise_\-- though perhaps Q only remembered it that way because it was Guinan's territory. The carpet was a light, relaxing blue, the walls were beige, and he was quite positive that the lights were simply brighter. He and Harry took a table near the transparent wall, next to the stars.

"Look at that," Harry said, pointing toward a spot at the far left. There was a ring in which the stars appeared duller than they should be, circumscribing a circle in which there were no stars at all. "We don't normally get to see these sorts of things up close like this. Eerie-looking, isn't it?"

"Not particularly," Q said, shrugging. "It's just a singularity."

"_Just_ a singularity?" Harry looked at him askance. "A spot where the natural laws of the universe break down, where light itself is swallowed whole, is not _just_ anything."

"You forget who you're talking to," Q said. "There's nothing special about a singularity to me. I've seen thousands of them."

"You have no romance in your soul," Harry complained.

Q laughed sardonically. "You flatter me."

"Every chance I get." Harry grinned. "Seriously, I find it hard to imagine that an intelligent man with a taste for physics could be so completely unmoved by the wonders of the universe."

Q sighed. "Oh, how terribly parochial. 'The wonders of the universe', Harry? I used to _create_ things like this. The only emotion a singularity might inspire in me is perhaps a bit of nostalgia for my misspent youth."

"Now you have me dying of curiosity. Why did you go about creating singularities? I can't help feeling that if _I_ were an omnipotent being, I could think of some more interesting things to manufacture."

"Such as tall young men to bring you wine and cater to your every whim, I'm sure."

Harry laughed. "How little you think of me, Q. No, I think I'd come up with something a bit more useful... though the concept does have an appeal." He leaned forward, eyes wide. "Although, that being said, I've always been more enamored of maturity and intellect in my love objects."

Q chose to ignore that. "How would you define useful? Going about spreading peace and understanding to the multitudes? Saving lives, being worshipped, all that tedious nonsense?"

"I had no idea you found being worshipped to be tedious nonsense."

"It gets old about the thirtieth millennium or so."

"I suppose you're going to want me to stop handing out the leaflets for the Reformed Church of Q, then."

"The _Reformed_ Church? I'm insulted, Harry. In the _old_ days, my worshipers wouldn't _think_ of reforming. Besides, who else would you get to go to your meetings?"

"I don't know, I thought Elejani Baíi might be amenable. Since you tricked her into thinking you rescued her planet and all."

"Wonderful. My worshipers include a deluded Laon'l and a degenerate with no aesthetic sense."

"A degenerate? I feel positively insulted."

"You said you had reformed. In my book, that makes you a degenerate."

"I'll de-form, then, just for you. What would you like me to deform into?"

"All you need is to promise you will never do it again, and I'll consider myself satisfied."

"Is that all? I thought I was going to have to make virgin sacrifices or something."

"No, you'll find me a very easygoing god. Besides, what would you expect _me_ to do with a virgin?"

"You prefer more experienced partners, hmm?" Harry asked, innocent and wide-eyed.

Q snorted to hide his embarrassment. He'd walked right into that one. "I have no interest in your petty little human reproductive rituals."

"It's not done for reproduction, believe you me."

"That's because something went frightfully haywire in the design."

Harry tsked. "Now see? If you'd taken that spot on the committee they offered you, you could have made sure no such mishaps occurred. Don't you feel foolish now?"

* * *

Q and Harry spent an enjoyable hour or so talking about nothing of any importance whatsoever. It was a lot more pleasant than dinner conversations with T'Laren, who insisted on talking about things that actually mattered. Here, whenever it seemed like the conversation would start to become serious, one or the other of them steered it away. Really, Q thought, he should have taken this up a long time ago. He could almost forgive Harry his embarrassingly maudlin meanderings when Q had been in sickbay.

They were deep in an attempt to determine exact definitions for all the synonyms of "stupid" and choose paradigmatic examples from the other conference attendees of each type of stupidity when Dr. Madeline LeBeau approached their table. Her face was flushed, and she seemed just a trifle unsteady on her feet. "I would definitely say 'idiot'," Q said lazily, watching her approach and anticipating some entertainment. "Don't you think?"

"Oh, definitely. Not a moron, though."

"No, not a moron."

"I know why you're here," LeBeau said. Her voice was just a little too shrill, just a little too hard. She leaned on the table, supporting herself with both hands as she leaned forward into his face.

"And I know why _you're_ here, from the smell of it," Q said, waving his hand in front of his face as if to fan her breath away. "Couldn't you at least get drunk on a decent vintage, LeBeau?"

"I'm not drunk," she said sharply. "And you don't fool me."

"Fool! That's it. That's even better than idiot," Q said brightly, turning to Harry. "Perfect."

She leaned forward a bit more, her elbow bumping Q's half-eaten dish of ice cream, but not spilling it. "You are here to sabotage the conference," she pronounced, as if she'd just caught him out as a Romulan spy.

"I certainly have nothing whatsoever better to do with my life than go about sabotaging some petty little scientific pow-wow," Q said with heavy sarcasm.

"But that's what you _do_, isn't it?" LeBeau snarled. "You go about insulting people, belittling their life work, all to make yourself seem important. You are _not_ important, Monsieur Q, not at all."

"Obviously I'm important enough for you to feel the need to attack me. Tell me, Dr. LeBeau, are you normally in the habit of conducting vicious and unprovoked attacks on people more intelligent than you are, or is it simply the wine? I'd always thought the French were better able to handle their liquor than this."

"You think you're so marvelous. 'Vicious and unprovoked attacks on people more intelligent than you are,'" she mimicked in a sing-song, whiny voice. "You're overrated, Q. I don't know why everyone hasn't figured that out by now."

"Bribery?" Roth suggested.

"Obviously you're right, doctor. I suppose, given a choice between listening to a being who is several million years old and has spent _all_ of that time performing experiments in physics, and listening to a drunkard, _anyone_ would choose the drunkard."

"I'm not drunk!"

"You mean you act like this all the time? I'd be ashamed to admit it, were I you."

"Do you enjoy these cruel little games you play? Do they give you pleasure?" she asked tonelessly.

"I must admit that they provide a tiny bright spot of pleasure in the unbearable tedium of my life, yes," Q said cheerfully. "You'd be amazed, really, at how much enjoyment one can get out of a few carefully placed witty comments. Perhaps you should try it sometime... oh, but that was cruel of me, wasn't it? I didn't mean to remind you of your crippling disability."

"My crippling disability?" LeBeau asked, brow furrowing in anger.

This was wonderful. She knew she was being set up and she _still_ walked into it. "Your complete and total lack of wit," Q said, eyes wide with false sympathy. "I suppose it's simply not a pastime you're equipped to understand."

"I heard about what you did to Dr. Christian," LeBeau hissed in a poisonous non sequitur.

This was unpleasant. "I did nothing to Dr. Christian," Q said in a bewildered tone, once again tormented by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune without having done anything to warrant them. Actually he knew exactly what LeBeau was talking about.

"You killed her son!" LeBeau said, as if outraged that he would dissemble about it.

A bit of genuine outrage sparked in Q. "I did no such thing!"

"Oh no?"

"Let me disabuse you of this misapprehension," Q said coldly. "The Borg killed Dr. Christian's son. Her delusions to the contrary are not my problem."

"And you had nothing to do with it, I suppose."

Q shrugged. This was turning ugly. "Space is not a safe place, m'dear," he said coldly. "Dr. Christian's son had the misfortune to be on a ship commanded by an arrogant, short-sighted man with a Pollyanna-esque belief in the essential goodness of the universe. Without a lesson in harsh realities, sooner or later Picard would have lost his entire ship, as he lost his first command. And without a lesson in the uselessness of Federation diplomatic tactics against the Borg, your entire miserable species would have been picked off by them in a matter of weeks. It _is_ unfortunate that Dr. Christian's son happened to be one of the very few who died for that lesson, but he and multitudes more would undoubtedly have died otherwise. One can forgive dearest Anne her failure to see this, since she is emotionally involved, but one must assume that _you_ are simply too stupid to comprehend reality."

"And you can justify murdering 18 people to yourself that way?"

"Actually, I don't need to justify it at all." She had actually succeeded in getting Q angry. He stared down at her coldly, as if she were an insect he had found on his shoe. "How often do you really feel the need to justify stepping on ants?"

"So you think of us as ants," LeBeau said triumphantly, as if she'd been fishing for that all along.

The triumph in her voice made Q think he'd made a misstep, played into some trap she was setting. But he could see how to salvage himself easily enough. "Well, when I had my powers, yes. Now I think of you as..." He pondered ostentatiously. "...mmm... dogs. Somewhat annoying puppylike creatures, lolling your tongues, scratching for fleas... Some of you actually achieve an almost wolven cunning, but most of you are pretty much domesticated lap dogs." He smirked.

Her face flushed with outrage. "That's all you know how to do, isn't it? You're not here to help the conference. You're just here to attack it."

"_You_ obviously have nothing better to do than walk up to people you barely know and start attacking them. I'd advise you acquire a hobby, Doctor. Obviously it can't be a _very_ diverting hobby, as you lack the intellect necessary to pursue anything interesting... I'd suggest knitting. Needlepoint."

LeBeau clutched the edge of the table, red with fury. She took a deep breath. "You seem to think your ridiculous insults bother me."

Q shrugged. "I'd say it's a fairly good guess." He stood up and went to LeBeau solicitously. "Unless your face is such an unlovely shade of red from the wine alone. Perhaps you've just had a bit too much to drink." He put his hand on her shoulder in a mockery of friendliness. "Maybe someone should take you home," he said, his tone utter innocence.

She shook him off and faced him, furiously. "I have not had too much to drink," she spat. "And I don't believe I need _anyone_ to 'take me home'."

"Pity," Q said coldly. "It would at least get you out of the way." He stepped back from her. "You're boring me, LeBeau. Why don't you run along and play?" An evil inspiration struck. He lifted a napkin off the table and tossed it. "Fetch!"

As LeBeau purpled, Harry was beginning to look nervous. He edged toward LeBeau. "I think he's right, Doctor. I think perhaps someone should take you home."

She laughed harshly. "Oh, but you'd agree with anything Q said. Tell me, Dr. Roth, do you think that if you spend enough time playing Q's arrogant little games with him, he'll actually agree to go to bed with you? I doubt he's very good."

"I'll take my chances," Harry said mildly.

"In _fact_," LeBeau said, drawing the words out, "I've _heard_ that he's actually quite abysmal."

She was saying it to get to him. It was ridiculous for him to take the accusation seriously. She had probably made it up on the spur of the moment. The fact that she seemed very much like the sort to be one of Amy Frasier's cronies almost certainly had nothing to do with it. It was preposterous for him to assume that just because she said something like that meant that someone had been spreading rumors about him. Preposterous and stupid... and he couldn't help himself. If she was just making it up now, that was one thing. But if someone had been telling lies about him...

"Oh, really," Q said coldly. "And who would you have heard that from?"

She smirked snidely. Oh, she knew when she'd scored a point, all right. "I think we both know."

"No. No, I'm _enormously_ curious as to who you could possibly have talked to. And why, exactly, they felt the need to make up elaborate sexual fantasies about me and lie to other people about them."

"Well, there can't have been that many," LeBeau said, still with the snide tone. "No one thinks you're very attractive. Except deluded creatures like him." She gestured at Roth.

"Maybe you should go home now," Roth said coldly.

"I don't think so," LeBeau snapped back.

Q dropped his voice and spoke to Roth conspiratorially, though certainly loudly enough for LeBeau to hear. "She's obviously mad with jealousy."

"That must be it," Roth agreed.

"Jealous? Of _you? _Don't make me laugh."

But Q had something now. He moved in with implacable coldness, intruding on LeBeau's space again, looking down at her. "Tell me, doctor, are you in the habit of fantasizing about the sex lives of total strangers? What is it about me that makes you feel the need to make up these egregious lies? Sour grapes, perhaps? You wish to convince yourself that I couldn't possibly be any good in bed, because you know you are far too shallow, stupid and primitive to attract me-- not to mention downright hideous?"

LeBeau's hand shot out, slamming across Q's cheek.

He saw it coming a split-second before it hit, and in that split-second the usual terror overwhelmed him, the familiar gut-wrenching sensation as he realized he had gone too far and was about to be beaten to a pulp for it. LeBeau's size and sex didn't factor into the equation-- most of the people that had beaten Q up in the past were smaller than he was, and more than a few were female. He wanted to cringe, to beg, to scream for help, to run away. But it was LeBeau's fault this time. He had defended himself from an unprovoked verbal assault. And why should _he_ have to be the one to cringe in fear? Why should _he_ have to humiliate himself by screaming for help? It wasn't fair!

The blow knocked his head to the side, sending pain through his entire face. But T'Laren had taught him self-defense techniques, things he could use to disable an attacker, and fury drove him to use them to lash out. In rage and humiliation, he grabbed the offending arm, twisting it out of the way where it couldn't strike him again.

LeBeau shrieked. It was a ghastly, horrible noise, the sort of sound security officers made when they were being murdered, and it startled Q into releasing the arm. Immediately LeBeau staggered back, holding her arm, which hung at an odd angle from her elbow. "You broke my arm!" she screamed.

He couldn't have. "I did not," Q said automatically, shocked. How could he have broken her arm? He'd felt something give when he twisted it away from him, yes, but he was weak, pathetically feeble. How could a human arm possibly be fragile enough for _him_ to break?

And then Security was standing there, uncomfortably close, the way they stood when they were about to drag him off to his room for another of Anderson's house arrests, only he hadn't done anything wrong. He had only defended himself. She would have beaten him up. "What happened here?" one of the security officers asked.

"He assaulted me! He broke my arm!" LeBeau screamed, voice shrill with pain. "Oh, God, I need a doctor..."

She had to be faking it. He _couldn't_ have broken her arm. "She hit me!" Q said, feeling a rising sensation of panic. No one would ever believe he hadn't instigated the conversation. It wasn't fair.

"So you broke her arm." The security guard's voice was cold.

"I didn't!"

"Then who did?"

A sob escaped LeBeau. Q glanced over at her. Several people had clustered around her, and most of them were glaring at him. Could she really be fooling all those people? "I didn't mean to," Q said helplessly. A hard anger overtook him. "She hit me first. I was defending myself."

"Against a human woman half your size."

They weren't going to understand. It was Amy Frasier all over again, the hideous double standard that let human women abuse human men however they wished and punished the men for defending themselves. Q folded his arms sullenly. "What's the point to me explaining? You've already judged me guilty."

One of them was looking at Harry. "Can you tell us what you saw?"

Harry looked at Q pleadingly. Q turned away from him. Roth was undoubtedly going to betray him too. Everyone took the human woman's side. That was definitely what he should have picked. A little bit of surgery would have taken care of the menstruation thing, and then he'd have had everyone fawning on him, jumping all over themselves to protect him no matter what he did. A little late to change his mind now, though.

"Dr. LeBeau was... um.. a little inebriated, I think. She came over and started making vicious accusations against Q. He defended himself verbally. The conversation got ugly, and she, uh, she slapped him, and he grabbed her arm. I don't think he was trying to break it."

"He did a damn good job if he wasn't even trying," the security guard said dryly. "Let's go." He tugged on Q's folded arm. From experience, Q knew that if he didn't go with them immediately, they would do something incredibly obnoxious and humiliating, like put manacles on him and drag him. He went, sullenly and with bad grace, but cooperatively, trying to hold onto at least a few shreds of his dignity.

If T'Laren hadn't taught him those damned self-defense techniques, this would never have happened. It was all her fault. He was going to kill her.

* * *

T'Laren was still reading when the door chimed. She was startled-- Q would have just entered, and she wasn't expecting anyone else. "Come in."

The door opened, and Harry Roth came in, looking upset. "T'Laren, something's happened. I think... I think you'd better come down to security."

She tensed. "What's happened?"

"I think it was an accident," Roth said, a slightly panicky edge to his voice. "I'm sure he didn't mean to do it, but you know how he is, he's not explaining himself to security and I'm sure they've got the wrong idea--"

T'Laren stood up. "Lt. Roth. _What happened?_"

"Q broke Dr. LeBeau's arm."

She had _not_ expected that. "Explain on the way," T'Laren said, sweeping out of their quarters with Roth in her wake. "How did it occur?"

As Roth gave a somewhat disjointed explanation of events, T'Laren's mind raced, feverishly piecing together what must have happened. Q considered physical violence barbaric and beneath him, but like most people who eschewed violence, he had a dark streak of it running beneath the surface. She remembered when he had tried to strangle her for pretending to throw him out the airlock-- could that be related to what had happened? But no, from Roth's story nothing had happened that would inspire Q to such anger. LeBeau had hit him, but surely Q was used to being hit...

...no, Q was used to being beaten up. People generally didn't slap Q, they punched him, and usually they did it more than once. And T'Laren had been training him to defend himself. Either he had tried to block LeBeau from hitting him again, and underestimated his own strength, which given that he seemed to be convinced of his physical powerlessness and that he was used to having a Vulcan sparring partner was entirely plausible, or he had deliberately tried to break her arm as a terrified and outraged reaction to the thought of being beaten again. Possibly some combination of both. The fact that LeBeau was half his size would not have entered into his mind, T'Laren felt sure-- this _was_ the same man who had called Security because he felt sexually threatened by a petite human woman, after all.

They arrived at security. The security chief, Lt. Ken Washington, was actually there, filling out some sort of report. T'Laren did not mince words. "I've come to see Q."

Washington looked up. He looked far too young, a pretty boyish creature with soft wavy chocolate-brown hair, a round face not yet devoid of baby fat, and big blue eyes. Those same eyes were set in a calm, businesslike expression, though. "You're his psychiatrist, correct?"

T'Laren winced inwardly, remembering that she'd introduced herself as such when she and Q had first boarded, the first time she'd met Washington. "'Therapist' is a more precise term," she said. "I'm a xenopsychologist and former Starfleet counselor."

"You're also Sovaz' older sister."

"I've come to see Q," T'Laren repeated, unsure what her relationship with Sovaz had to do with anything, and annoyed that he'd brought it up.

Washington nodded. He stood up. "You can speak to him outside the cell, or if you prefer, you can go in. If you're inside, I can give you fifteen minutes with privacy modulation on. After that, I'd have to turn it off."

It took T'Laren a moment to remember what privacy modulation was-- the ability to make the forcefield to the cells in the brig soundproof, so a person could have privacy to discuss their case with an advocate. It was not a right, but a privilege, permitted in cases where it was unlikely that the safety of the ship or people on it would be affected. She was almost surprised that Washington had offered it though, having expected that she would need to fight for every concession. "I would prefer the privacy modulation, thank you."

Q looked curiously small in the cell, hunched over with one knee on the bunk, his arms wrapped around it and his chin resting on it. His expression was a hard mask, but T'Laren could read him well enough to see the loneliness and fear under his stony expression. He looked up as T'Laren approached the cell. "This is all _your_ fault, you know."

"My fault?" T'Laren repeated, raising an eyebrow, as Washington let her through the forcefield and engaged the privacy modulation. "Can you tell me exactly what happened?"

"Why bother? I'm sure that you, like everyone else, have already made up your mind."

"Have I ever made up my mind without even talking to you first? Be realistic, Q. We have fifteen minutes in which the guards can't overhear us-- let's use them wisely."

"Why? Are we going to plot my escape? Were you planning on charging in here with a phaser rifle and camouflage grays, perhaps?"

"I thought you might appreciate being able to tell me your version of events _without_ it getting all over the starship. Or being left to Lt. Washington's discretion, for that matter."

"A guilty conscience at work, I see. You don't want to reveal to the entire ship your own ineptitude in causing this debacle. Let's not try to pretend you're doing this for _my_ sake, T'Laren."

"Since, in fact, I _am_ doing it for your sake, and I would consider my own role in what occurred to be minimal at best, I have no need to pretend anything." She sat down next to him. "Q, please tell me what happened. I can't help you if I don't know what happened."

"Talk to Harry. I'm sure he'll gleefully tell the entire story to _anyone_ who asks," Q said bitterly.

"I need to hear _your_ version of the story to help you."

"I don't need your help," Q snarled. "You have done quite enough damage as it is, _dear_ doctor. My captivity here can be laid entirely at your doorstep, and I do _not_ need you to dig me in any deeper."

There was no way to be conciliatory, no way to gently persuade him to listen to her when he was in a mood like this. "You have no choice," she told him coldly. "I am going to help you whether you like it or not. The only decision you have to make is how much time it takes. If I don't have your testimony, it may take me several days to come up with a sufficiently persuasive lie, and in the meantime you will be languishing in the brig, while Dr. LeBeau has full freedom of the starship. If you cooperate, I should be able to get you out much faster, and possibly see LeBeau reprimanded or punished for _her_ complicity in this. Which would you rather?"

He stared at the floor sullenly. "What makes you think that if I tell you what happened, you'll be able to get me out any faster than if you just make it up? You'd probably come up with a better story than the truth, anyway."

"Possibly, but do you want your excuse to be solely in my hands, without any input from you? Normally you're much better at keeping control of your own image than that."

"Since you seem to be as incapable of coming up with a decent defense as you are incompetent at self-defense training, I suppose I have no choice," Q said petulantly.

His version of the story, when one filtered out the gratuitous insults and the self-pitying whining, was not substantially different from Harry Roth's, and confirmed both her theories. A bit of reading between the lines was necessary, but really, less than usual. Q had no idea how strong he was. He had acted both to prevent LeBeau from attacking him again and in anger that she had attacked him in the first place, had been convinced that she meant to do him serious harm, and had had no idea that he was capable of breaking her arm, let alone any intention of doing so. Reading a bit deeper between the lines, T'Laren suspected he felt terribly guilty about it, and was transposing his guilt onto her, blaming her for what he'd done so he didn't have to face his own guilt.

"All right." She stood up as Washington signaled her that he was turning off the privacy modulation. "Give me a few hours to try to get you out of here. If I can't get you out by then, I'll come back and let you know how I'm doing."

"And what am I supposed to do for a few hours?" Q asked harshly. "Just sit here and twiddle my thumbs?"

"Take a nap," T'Laren suggested.

"Have you any _idea_ how hard and unpleasant these bunks are? The last time I was in one of these dungeons, on the _Enterprise_, I fell asleep, and I regretted it for hours." He considered. "Actually, it turned out they drugged me. I don't trust Security for a minute. Can't you get someone to watch them, to make sure they don't drug me?"

"You had a history on the _Enterprise_ when you were there," T'Laren said patiently. "You have no history here. And you're now a Federation VIP. No one would dare drug you."

"Well, I'm _not_ going to sleep," Q said sulkily. "And I'm going to be bored out of my mind."

"I'll see what I can do."

She turned toward the force field. "I'm ready, Lieutenant."

As she stepped through, she glanced back at Q. For just a moment, he had a desperately forlorn expression on his face, as if he wanted to beg her not to leave him. Then he hardened into the stony mask again. She looked away and turned to Washington. "Lieutenant, would it be possible for Q to have read-only terminal access? It would be preferable if he had the ability to do some work while he's here. I understand the security issues involved with terminal access, but surely he would be safe with read-only."

Washington gazed at her impassively. Finally he nodded, once, and returned to his desk, where he apparently punched a few buttons on his console. A wall panel in Q's cell slid up to reveal a terminal. Washington walked up to the cell as Q gave him a puzzled look, as if unable to understand why Security would grant him anything at all. "It uses standard voice commands, but it will only allow you visual access-- you can't record and you can't listen."

Q glanced at the terminal and back at Washington. "Well, this might make the crushing boredom of this cell lighten a sufficient fraction that I won't die of it."

"You're welcome," Washington said evenly.

"Who should I speak to about getting the charges dropped?" T'Laren asked him.

"Me. Let's go to my office." He touched his badge. "Wiggins, I need you on duty in the brig."

They waited the minute or two until security officer Wiggins showed up, then stepped into Washington's office to the side of the main security office. The door swooshed shut behind them. "I suppose," Washington said, "that you're going to tell me this was an accident."

"That would hardly be a sufficient excuse," T'Laren said. "No, Lieutenant. I think it would be more helpful if I explain the reason for the accident."

He sat down, and gestured her to a seat. "I'm listening."

"I don't know if you're aware of this," she began, "but Q has effectively spent the past three years of his life in a war zone. He has suffered multiple attempts on his life. He has been beaten savagely, sometimes by the very people who were supposed to be protecting, often by people whom he physically outsizes. Because he lost so much when he lost his powers, he has a deep-seated image of himself as powerless, to the point that he has never learned how to defend himself physically while he was on Starbase 56-- he never believed there would be any point. And it became a self-reinforcing cycle-- he didn't try to defend himself, so he was hurt worse, so he became more convinced of his own helplessness."

"Are you saying that he couldn't be bothered learning to defend himself?"

It was impossible to read Washington's tone-- still calm and even. "No," T'Laren said, "not at all. I'm saying he was doomed to failure. You must know, Lieutenant, that believing in oneself is the first step toward succeeding, at anything. No one can succeed at something if they are sure they'll fail. You know that."

He nodded. "It's something they teach at the Academy, yes."

"It's true. And this is why it was so very difficult to teach Q how to defend himself-- he believes he is powerless and weak."

"He must know he's bigger than everyone else," Washington said, still with the same mild tone.

"With respect, Lieutenant, you are taller than me. But if you can defeat me in hand-to-hand combat, it's because you're better trained. When I was twelve years old, I could defeat adult male humans twice my size in wrestling matches. Size has very little to do with it."

"Yes, but you're Vulcan."

"I am that. I'm also well-trained and very determined. I have defeated Romulans who were considerably bigger than me, _and_ who had some training, because I have focused on that all my life. I pride myself on my abilities at self-defense. Q, however, has been frequently beaten by people who are physically smaller and quite possibly not as physically strong as he is, and this has simply reinforced his belief that he will always be the one who gets hurt.

"I recognized this as a serious problem, and have more or less coerced Q into training. I've tried to present lessons in such a fashion that if he actually tries, at all, he won't fail. Sooner or later, it was my hope, he would develop the self-confidence to believe in his own physical abilities, and in the meantime I've taught him a few things that he can use in an emergency. What happened today was that Q believed that Dr. LeBeau was about to beat him. Remember, he was not raised human-- he doesn't _know_ what it means when a human woman slaps a man. The fact that she is smaller and weaker than he is was meaningless to him-- he's been hurt badly by people who are smaller and weaker than him, before. So he reacted to protect himself from being hit again, without any clear notion of the actual level of threat Dr. LeBeau represented. And being panicked, and convinced that she represented an immediate threat to his well-being and that he would be virtually powerless to stop her, he would subconsciously have struck with full force."

"A beaten dog finally biting back?" Washington asked.

"I would not have used that analogy, but it has some validity to it."

Washington leaned back in his chair. "To be honest with you, Dr. T'Laren, I had expected something like this," he said. "After this incident, I read through Q's files. He doesn't have a history of abusing women." His tone was rather dry. "He _does_ have a history of verbal abuse, but in this case the witnesses all say that LeBeau started it. LeBeau also hit him, and I haven't got a great deal of respect for women who go about hitting men and then cry 'assault' when the men hit back. Violence against a stranger is _always_ a bad idea, even if that stranger is ostensibly a member of one's own species. So my inclination would have been to let Q go some time ago."

"But?" T'Laren prompted.

"But Dr. LeBeau pressed formal charges. I can't release a man who's been charged with committing assault out on his own recognizance with nothing more than my own hunch that it'll work out. On the other hand, if I have a formal report from a psychologist that I can use to reassure my superiors that I didn't just let a dangerous criminal go wandering the ship..."

"Of course," T'Laren said, relieved. This had gone remarkably well. She was almost nervous, expecting another shoe to drop.

"Perhaps it would be better if he got some self-defense training here," Washington said. "No offense, Dr. T'Laren, but I doubt you've been given a great deal of training in how to train people. Since he's here anyway, he might be best off getting some lessons from us."

"Do you think so?" She considered. "It's certainly a good suggestion, but Q can be very, very stubborn. I'm not sure it will be possible to persuade him to accept training, though I can certainly try."

"What if it's made a condition of his sentence at the hearing?" Washington asked. "Even if Dr. LeBeau won't drop the charges, I can't see Q being given anything all that terrible as a sentence, but that might certainly be part of it."

"I'd rather avoid that if possible. Q... is very unresponsive to coercion. If he's ordered to take self-defense lessons, he'll be entirely too resentful and sullen to get anything out of them at all."

Washington grinned. "He sounds like my kid brother."

* * *

An hour later, Washington had his report and Q was free, with a warning that unless LeBeau dropped the charges he would have to attend a hearing in a few days.

Q walked back to his room with T'Laren, wrapped in a sullen silence. It was very late at night. He hadn't been able to sleep in the cell-- he well remembered how unpleasant it had been to sleep in the brig, the very first time he'd fallen asleep, and besides he was dressed too uncomfortably to be able to relax at all. There was another source of serious discomfort as well. The cell had had only the most minimal of privacy, a recessed alcove with a toilet in it, with a partial screen that would block only the most crucial portions of view, and that only if he sat down. The way his clothing was designed, he would need to disrobe almost entirely to use the facilities. It hadn't struck him as such a terrible design when he first put the clothes on, but then, he had expected to be out for no more than two hours, and certainly not stuck in a dungeon with some Starfleet eager beaver staring at him. So he had ignored certain bodily requirements in favor of maintaining his dignity, and he was paying for it now. The only thing that kept him from running for his room, and his bathroom, was the fact that running would make the sensation worse.

In addition, he was exhausted, and his back was screaming at him. Fortunately, T'Laren didn't seem to want to talk, which was a first. He wanted to snap at her, to verbally flay her for getting him into this, but he was too tired and too uncomfortable. He also wanted her to rub his back, so badly that he was almost contemplating actually asking.

Once they reached the room, he headed immediately for the bathroom, and stripped off his uncomfortable armor with a deep sigh of relief. After taking care of more pressing business, he proceeded to spend the next twenty minutes in the sonic shower, getting rid of the filth and sweat of hours stuck in costume. It was truly disgusting how human bodies generated all this filth. Skin flakes. Who had designed skin flakes? Random evolution seemed hardly malicious enough to produce such a diabolical result. If _he_ had been in charge, he would have done a _much_ better job.

The bathroom replicator was not programmed to produce any of the clothing patterns Q had put into the bedroom replicator. This was a source of serious annoyance to Q, who had gratefully forgotten how low the selection of acceptable clothing was on a Galaxy-class starship. After a great deal of effort, he finally managed to find a black satin bathrobe and a pair of royal blue pajamas that he considered acceptable, wrestled his hair, always unruly after a shower, into some semblance of order, and went out.

T'Laren had out a big plate of fruit and cheese, with small empty plates beside it. She seemed intent on devouring the fruit. He scowled at her. "You're eating at _this_ hour?"

"Would you like some?" She held a small plate of peach slices out to him.

"How unutterably nauseating. Do you have any idea what time it is?"

"0243 hours and 57 seconds," T'Laren replied absently, pulling the plate back and munching on a peach slice. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"You can't seriously mean me to eat at this hour," Q said, sitting down. His back was screaming at him, pleading with him to break down and ask T'Laren for a backrub, and it was making him particularly irritable.

"I don't. You can eat if you like, or not." She put a pair of fresh bagels and a cheese danish on a plate and pushed it toward his side of the table. "If you do eat, I'd suggest bread products. You might have stomach pains if you ate fruit at this hour."

"I might have stomach pains if I have to watch you guzzling your food like that," Q retorted.

"Then don't watch." She wrapped a pineapple slice in a cheese slice and bit it in half. Q grimaced.

"What is your fetish for fruit, anyway?"

T'Laren looked up at him. "I'll let you in on a secret, if you promise to tell no one else," she said gravely.

"I'm not making any promises."

"Yes, but no one would believe you, so I imagine our secret is safe." She leaned forward. "Have you ever noticed how obsessed Terrans are with chocolate?"

Chocolate was one of the few foodstuffs Q could actually tolerate in large quantities; he had been known to eat three meals of chocolate ice cream a day. No doubt this was a not-so-subtle dig on T'Laren's part. "As if you were entirely immune."

"I like chocolate," T'Laren confessed. "But my real weakness is for fruit. If you are ever in a position where you're attempting to make a stubborn Vulcan eat, try succulents. Grapes, cherries, berries..." She popped a few into her mouth. "I am convinced that Earth was specifically created for the purpose of producing fruit."

The hyperbole amused Q, taking a bit of the edge off his irritation. "What would you know about it?" he asked lazily. "You weren't there."

"Merely forming a hypothesis. Why, were you?"

"I might have been."

"Then tell me, o font of wisdom, why was Earth created?"

"A cosmic accident," Q said. "It was Mars we had hopes for."

"How do you know that a power higher than the Q didn't induce you to create the Earth just for the sake of fruit?"

"There _is_ no power higher than the Q."

"Well, of course you'd think that," T'Laren said. "If It had intended you to be able to handle the notion of beings higher than yourselves, It would hardly have created you with such enormous egos."

T'Laren was being unusually humorous tonight. Normally she wasn't any good for this sort of light witty repartee, though she was remarkably talented at the somewhat more vicious kind. "Cling to your delusions if it makes you feel better," Q said lightly. "I had no idea Vulcans subscribed to anything so illogical as religion."

"I have a god telling me that religion is illogical," T'Laren said somberly. "There is something askew in this picture."

"Only in your limited mortal opinion," Q responded, tentatively starting to enjoy himself. He leaned forward to take the danish, feeling the need for a prop, and possibly some sugar-- it had been a long time since his last coffee, and exhaustion was beginning to rag his edges.

As he leaned forward, a sharp shooting pain went up through his back, the muscles in his lower back spasming. His first, instinctive reaction was to try to hide it; humans had made it very clear to Q that he spent too much time whining about how much pain he was in, and he tried very hard to hide that, to avoid being laughed at. But then he realized that that was a foolish thing to do here; if T'Laren knew he was in pain, she would jump at the chance to help him. So he let the moan that he'd instinctively stifled out after all, and put his hand to the small of his back.

T'Laren immediately looked concerned. "Are you all right?"

"Of course, I whimper in agony all the time," Q retorted. The pleasure and relaxation he'd started to feel had vanished, leaving him extremely irritable.

"Would you like me to rub your back?"

He almost moaned at that, at the very thought. He'd been wanting her to offer for hours. But right now, he didn't feel like being in any lower-status position at all, and even so much as simply saying "yes" would put him there. "It's the least you could do, since you were responsible for the incarceration that led to this," he snapped.

T'Laren made no move toward him, merely gazed at him as if he were an intriguing species of tropical fish. He glared at her. It was on the tip of his tongue to snarl, "Well?" when she broke her silence. "You honestly don't know what you've just done, do you?"

"What are you talking about?"

"I'd thought about actually granting your point," T'Laren said, "or at the very least, ignoring your rudeness and giving you a backrub anyway. It gives me no pleasure to see you in pain, and I myself am hardly offended when you behave in an obnoxious manner. But other people will not make allowances for your bad moods, Q. I would be doing you no favors if I ignored your rudeness."

Q stared at her for a second. "Let me translate that for you, since you seem to have such a hard time expressing yourself," he said harshly. "'I promised I'd give you a backrub, Q, but you're annoying me, so I'm going to make it sound like I'm doing this for your own good instead of admitting I have emotions.' Isn't that right?"

"Actually, no," T'Laren said. "It's quite wrong. Let's analyze what you did wrong here." She leaned forward. "When I offered to give you something that you show every sign of wanting rather badly, you responded with a personal attack. This is not acceptable behavior; no one will grant what you wish after you've attacked them for offering, or if they do, they will do so in as unpleasant a fashion as they can manage."

"I hardly _attacked_ you, T'Laren. I merely pointed out your culpability in my current miserable state."

"Let's look at that, briefly. You broke a woman's arm and ended up in the brig for it. This is ostensibly my fault for teaching you how to defend yourself. Yet I never taught you to break people's arms for slapping you. This would seem to be a failure of your own common sense. But be that as it may. Even if I were entirely at fault, it is not appropriate to attack me for having caused the problem when I have just offered to fix it."

"I suppose you'd rather I fell at your feet and worshipped you," Q retorted sarcastically.

"No, actually. I'd have preferred if you said 'Yes, thank you.' Or 'Thanks.' Or "That would be nice.' Or nothing at all. Nothing at all is not an ideal alternative, as people would find that offensive in the long term, but it's better than what you did say."

"Wonderful. I am enlightened. Now what?"

"Now you apologize."

"I will do no such thing. It _is_ your fault my back is so bad right now. For that matter, the fact that I've been able to maintain an even vaguely bearable mood over the past several days is most assuredly despite your behavior, which has been reprehensible." Q stood up. "You have been ignoring your duties to me in such a consistent fashion that if it were _me_ who had hired you, I would certainly give you your walking papers now. You have been erratic, overemotional, and vicious. I warn you, if this behavior persists, you will be dispensed with."

"I think it's very interesting that you consider a request that you apologize to be a threat you must react to with more threats," T'Laren said calmly. "Please observe that your back is not being rubbed."

As if he could possibly miss that. "I didn't ask you for any favors," Q snapped. "I don't _need_ a backrub, and I don't need _you_. Both are luxuries, and I'm perfectly capable of doing without either one!"

He stormed off to his room before she could get the last word, unreasonably outraged. It was not at all fair. If she hadn't wanted to rub his back, fine, he hadn't asked, he didn't need it, but why had she offered in the first place? That was simply cruelty. Q dumped his robe on a chair-- normally he was very careful with his clothes, hanging them up back in his wardrobe, but this was just replicator junk-- and flung himself on the bed, lying flat. Some of the tension drained away, just enough to make the rest of it really painfully obvious.

It hurt so much. He had endured pain this bad in the past, dozens of times. Hundreds. Thousands. But he'd allowed himself to get used to getting massages. Obviously a very bad idea. Q sat up and half-heartedly tried the stretching exercises T'Laren had taught him to loosen up his back and neck; right now he'd try anything. But they were as useless as he expected them to be, and he lay back down, stifling a moan of pain. Wonderful. The creature in the other room had superhuman hearing, had been _known_ to hear a faint, tiny whimper from him through two doors, and here he was, in agony, unable to get rid of her and completely unwilling to let her hear him suffering.

Q got up and walked over to the replicator. "Cyomil capsules," he told it.

"That item is under medical restriction."

Figured. He hadn't really expected that to work. "Prozium lozenges."

The weak painkiller appeared in the replicator. He snatched out the two lozenges and swallowed them without benefit of water. They would do him absolutely no good, of course; he needed stronger stuff, but if the replicator wouldn't even let him have Cyomil, there was little chance it would give him something _really_ useful.

He went back to bed and laid down, trying to sleep and knowing exactly how futile it would be. There had been more nights than he could count that had been like this... but before, he'd always been able to go down to Sickbay and harass Li into giving him painkillers, or after they were restricted, sedatives. Now he actually toyed with the idea of going to Sickbay and getting whatever doctor they had here to give him something... but in the first place, he couldn't leave the room without T'Laren seeing him and realizing that he couldn't sleep, and in the second place, he was sure T'Laren had put some sort of restriction on his medical file. She might not have the power to prescribe anything without a physician's approval, but if she had power anywhere equivalent to Counselor Medellin's, she could restrict him from getting a prescription for psychoactives fulfilled.

In fact, she had total power over his life. Bitterness welled up in him, and a sense of rage at himself, for letting himself be seduced into giving her that power. When he had left the starbase in T'Laren's care, he had effectively signed his life over to her. How could he have been so blind? So stupid?

How could he have done anything differently, though?

He did moan then, quietly, pressing his head into the pillow so she wouldn't hear. He had signed his life away when he'd first handed himself over to Picard, naked and powerless. How could he have expected it would be any different? His knowledge and abilities didn't give him power, they gave him value, and value made him a commodity. And if he hadn't been a commodity, he would have been worthless, and would have died for it. But as a commodity, he was a possession, with no control over his own life. Picard, Anderson, now T'Laren... he was allowed to change owners of his own free will sometimes, as he'd done with T'Laren, but there was no question that he was still a slave.

Q shifted again, trying uselessly to make himself more comfortable. The pain was bad enough that he wanted to cry, was holding it off by sheer force of will. He couldn't do this. When he was awake and active, he didn't notice the pain. He should get up now and go tear T'Laren to shreds, but he was terrified that if he faced her, she would manipulate him somehow, wear down his resistance, and he would break down and apologize.

_Would that be so bad? _a treacherous part of his mind whispered. Maybe it was a small concession after all. Was his pride worth this pain?

Yes. His fingers dug into the pillow until the knuckles went white. His pride was all he had left. Anderson had broken him in the past, made him crawl, jerked him around like a puppet and made him dance for her, but T'Laren wasn't Anderson. She wouldn't put him under house arrest for not apologizing; she'd just refuse to give him a backrub. And he could endure that. He didn't need her help. Okay, he wanted it, wanted it very badly, but he didn't need it, and he wouldn't crawl to get it. This was a matter of principle, and he would _not_ give in.

So. If he couldn't sleep, and he couldn't leave his room for fear of T'Laren seeing him, what else was there? He couldn't use the computer; even if he set it to keyboard commands only, even if he muted it, she'd hear his fingers on the keys. He could get a pair of headphones from the replicator and listen to music-- it wouldn't give too much away if she heard him do that. He could read. That was about it.

Oh, joy.

He turned in bed again, in exactly the wrong direction, and a stab of agony shot through his side and lower back. A whimper escaped him before he could stop it, followed by a sick sense of humiliation. She was listening and she'd heard him, he was sure of it. She knew he was suffering because he wouldn't give in to her, knew he was weak.

There was a buzz at the door. Of course. "Go away!" he shouted.

"I wanted to apologize," T'Laren's voice came through the door intercom.

Apologize? She _should_ apologize, but it was totally out of character for her to do so, Q thought. T'Laren never admitted she was wrong. What kind of trick was this? "I don't care. Go away!"

There was a moment of silence, and then, "Please?"

That simple word brought him up short. Had T'Laren ever pleaded with him for anything? It seemed an utterly alien thing for her to be doing. "If you must," Q sighed, defeated by a single plaintive word.

The door opened. She took a step inside. "I'm sorry," she said simply. "I chose the wrong moment to make my point, and placed you in an untenable position. I should have known your pride would not allow you to respond, and I should not have pushed you that way."

Q wasn't entirely sure what she was apologizing for-- that wasn't how _he_ would describe what she did. It sounded to him uncomfortably as if she were apologizing for not manipulating him properly. "Is that it?"

"Pardon?"

"You just waltz on in with your pathetic excuse for an apology, you don't even mention what you actually _did_ to me, and you expect me to kiss and make up? How stupid do you think I am?"

"What specifically are you referring to when you say 'what I actually did to you'?"

He sat up. "Oh, don't play coy, T'Laren. You know what you did."

"Certainly. At least, I know what I think I did. What I don't know is what you perceive me to have done."

"Do you expect me to believe that?"

"Since you would rather I avoided reading your mind, I think you're going to have to."

Q's eyes narrowed. "You're supposed to be an intelligent woman. Try using your brain for once."

"All right." She sat down on the edge, uncomfortably close to him. Actually, it wouldn't have been uncomfortably close-- it was the normal distance she kept from him-- but he was in too much pain. Having her this close to him, so close to giving him what he needed, and being unable to ask or even hint at what he wanted, was torture. He wanted to edge away from her, but if he did that she might go away and then there would be no hope at all. "You must perceive me as being monstrously unfair. To you, I offered something and then refused it, in such a fashion that you couldn't even challenge me for my refusal, because if you did it would imply you wanted it and that would make you feel as if you were begging. Admitting in any sense that you actually want me to rub your back and feel betrayed that I wouldn't do it would humiliate you. So even if you were inclined to apologize, the fact that I was trying to persuade you to do so by offering you something you wanted if you apologized made it seem to you that if you apologized you were giving in to coercion. I put you in a position where you were forced either to give in on a matter of principle, or to torture yourself by refusing. That is what I'm apologizing for, Q. Does that help?"

Her insights terrified him sometimes. It was hard to believe that she could only read his mind if she was touching him. Right now, he found her words frightening and reassuring at the same time-- he didn't need to tell her what was wrong if she could figure it out and tell _him_. "You missed your calling," he told her, leaning back against the headboard and the pillows. "You should have gone into writing detective novels."

"I don't get any real enjoyment out of detective novels," T'Laren said. "I tend to ignore all the clues to the plot and focus on the meta-plot-- I try to figure out who did it based on the author's dramatic agenda. Sadly, it works a good three-fourths of the time." She shifted, turning toward him, pulling one leg onto the bed and folding it. "I don't enjoy seeing you in pain, Q. I'm a healer, and only secondarily a teacher-- I haven't the stomach to make you suffer for principle's sake, even if I think I'm right. If you would accept it, I'd like to try to do something about your back."

Q swallowed. This was what he wanted, what he'd hoped for when he let her into his room and let her sit near him, but the act of admitting that yes, he did want this paralyzed him. The humiliation of having to ask for help, even help that was offered to him on a silver platter, washed over him. It was almost on the tip of his tongue to respond the way he had earlier tonight, with something scathing that made it seem as if he was doing her a favor, but he remembered too well what had happened when he did that last time. "I certainly wouldn't you want to lose sleep worrying about me," he finally said, striving for a light tone and miserably sure he hadn't pulled it off.

"Lie down," T'Laren said, her tone patiently indulgent, humoring him. He obeyed with alacrity, the tension much worse in the seconds he was waiting for her touch. T'Laren got up and moved around him, to where he couldn't see her anymore unless he strained his neck. He felt her weight settle on the bed again, and held himself agonizingly taut with anticipation.

Slowly fingertips pressed into the area just under his neck, between shoulderblades and spine, and began to rub. Q moaned. It hadn't been this bad since the first time, that first night aboard _Ketaya_. He was going to make a complete fool of himself again, he knew it. But he couldn't bring himself to care overly much. The easing agony in his back as her hands worked slowly down his spine was all he could focus on, all he could care about, and while he had a sort of abstract fear of admitting his weakness and his need for this, it was a far distant concern.

"This is worse than usual, isn't it," T'Laren asked.

It was several seconds before he had breath or concentration to spare for an answer. "Yes, much," he gasped. "_Ohh... _do you know why? Is this... oh... is this normal?"

"You'd know better than I would," T'Laren said. "I don't think I've ever seen you this bad. But is this fairly normal for you?"

"I don't know... I have no concept anymore. Everything's changed."

"What do you mean?"

"A little lower... ohh... right there, yes. Everything's changed, is what I mean. You've corrupted me."

"In what way?"

"Tonight... I think it's normal... well, not _normal_, but it's usual for me to hurt this much. Happens all the time. But I used to be able to ignore it more. And it used to happen a lot more often. I think I remember hurting like this every night... but that can't be right. If that were true, I can assure you there'd have been a lot more than three suicide attempts."

"Were you taking a lot of painkillers?"

"Li wouldn't let me have enough painkillers. Ever. He kept saying I'd abuse them."

"In your medical file, it claims that at one point you were taking six tablets of Feranzal a day. Do you remember doing anything like that?"

"I'm hardly going senile already," Q retorted. "That was... _ahh_... that was when I'd been human for, I don't know, four or five months maybe. After that Li started cutting me off."

She shifted to her knuckles for the small of his back, digging in over a broad band of muscle. The relief was so intense he almost wanted to cry. "Are you aware that one Ferenzal tablet is the recommended dosage for an adult human male? That if you give most humans three tablets, you could cut off their fingers and they'd hardly notice?"

"Well, I didn't start out taking six."

"What did you take tonight?"

"What do you mean?"

"I heard you asking the replicator for something, but I couldn't make out what."

"Prozium lozenges. And they were totally useless. Exactly as I expected. Ahh... no, back where you were before. Right there. Yes."

"Prozium lozenges are the strongest things most humans without an acute medical condition need, Q. They're completely useless for you?"

"Totally. They worked for maybe a week. Haven't since. But any port in a storm... I had no idea you would be sensible enough to apologize."

"We have to do something about that," T'Laren said gently, digging her thumbs into the small of his back. "Q, it's not normal for a human to be in that much pain all the time. I think your reactions to pain might be finally starting to normalize-- when you first became human, you probably had so little tolerance for pain that you abused painkillers, to the point where they would never again have a normal level of effectiveness for you. You've probably never been able to completely wean yourself from them-- even when Li would cut you off, you were too often injured for you to be deprived of painkillers entirely. As a result, you were always suffering withdrawal pangs; Li didn't enforce his controls on you consistently enough to be of any benefit in stopping your addiction--"

"I am _not_ addicted to painkillers!"

"Q, you are. There's no other explanation. You may not be suffering direct physical addiction now, but your body's been sensitized. In the same way that an alcoholic would become fully addicted again after just one drink, you keep getting off painkillers and then getting addicted to them again because some incredible fool prescribes them for you for back pain. Or you suffer some near-fatal injury and end up needing such a huge quantity of drug, given your high tolerance to painkillers, that you end up storing the excess in your body for months." She reached down to the back of his legs, just above the knees, and began kneading the muscles there gently. "Does this make you uncomfortable?"

He could not comprehend anything having to do with massage being uncomfortable. "No... why, are you fishing for compliments? You _must_ know how good that feels."

"I meant... well, let me rephrase the whole thing. Your legs are a disaster area, Q. I'm not entirely done with your back, but I think any more work there without dealing with the leg muscles is going to produce diminishing returns. It would be best to do everything-- gluteal muscles, legs, feet-- but I know that you're not terribly comfortable with touching at all, and a lot of humans would perceive any contact with their buttocks and the backs of their thighs as a sexual touch. I don't intend anything sexual, but I don't want you to feel any sort of discomfort in that way at all."

She was right. If it meant she had to touch him near his groin, even if it was on the back of his body, he wasn't at all sure he would be comfortable with it. On the other hand, what she was doing felt wonderful, and the moment she made the suggestion he could feel the tension in the upper part of his legs, begging for something to soothe it. "I don't have to take off my clothes, do I?"

"As usual, though it would be more effective if you did, it isn't necessary."

He thought about it. But it was more or less a foregone conclusion. After all, if she did something he didn't like, he could always stop her. Q took a deep breath. "If you must," he said, meaning yes, please.

T'Laren shifted position on the bed. She moved back up to his lower back, to the line where back became buttocks, and dug her fingers in slowly. Q made a half-hearted attempt not to moan with relief, failed, and decided he didn't really care. He hadn't been consciously aware of the intensity of the pain in his lower back and leg muscles-- he'd known his lower back hurt, but he'd thought the biggest problem was the upper back and neck area. Now he realized that the pain had gone deep enough that somehow he had stopped noticing it-- how long had it been this way? He had been in a generally good mood over the past few days, he couldn't remember being in a lot of pain-- had all this happened while he was in the brig? He was going to absolutely kill LeBeau. How dared she cause something like this to happen to him? Who did she think she was?

"I don't understand what happened today," he confessed, talking into his pillow as she worked her way down.

"Which of the various things that happened today do you mean?"

For a moment he was irritated. What did she _think_ he meant? Then she found a particularly unpleasant knot and started working it out gently, and he temporarily lost the ability to be genuinely irritated with her about anything. "LeBeau," he gasped. "How could she be so... fragile? If human bones break _that_ easily, how could she have been stupid enough to hit me?... for that matter, _why_ did they arrest _me_ when she hit me first?... Is it a gender thing, or simply a 'Q must be the bad guy because he always is' thing?"

"Human bones aren't that fragile. I'd think you'd have more experience than I would with exactly how fragile humans are."

"That's what I don't understand... I'm hardly some hulking bruiser. I wasn't _trying_ to hurt her... how could it be so easy that I could do it by accident?"

"Because you're a lot stronger than you think you are." She had worked her way past his buttocks now, and now was gently kneading the back and outer sides of his thighs. He was almost dizzy with relief, the sensations making him lose track of where exactly his body was. When he closed his eyes, he felt sudden lapses of proprioception, up temporarily becoming down and a sensation of weightlessness, dizzy bodilessness. The sensations always faded the moment he moved, and would fade by themselves if he didn't, but he found them intensely pleasurable, if a little frightening. As a human, sensations of dizziness and weightlessness were usually associated with falling, or being about to lose consciousness, or other not entirely pleasant circumstances, but he was more than a human and the brief inability to feel the boundaries of his physical body in space felt to him like brief moments of freedom from having a physical body at all. And then when he came back to himself, it was usually to the exquisite sensation of a protesting muscle being forced to relax itself. Q whimpered with pleasure as she started working on the back of his calves. "I don't think I've seen you this bad since our first night on _Ketaya. _You haven't been working out at all since we arrived at the conference, have you?"

"You haven't been dragging me off to the gym for torture sessions, no."

"This is the result," T'Laren said seriously. "Q, I'm sorry. I've been entirely too preoccupied with my personal concerns. I should have made sure you continued your exercise regimen."

"I was always pulling some muscle or other. I don't see how this could be-- ohh-- worse."

"But it is, isn't it? When you pulled a muscle from exertion, we'd massage it or soak it out right there. You never had to walk around for days with it." Abruptly she abandoned his legs entirely and moved up to his arms, which were stretched over his head, largely burrowed under his pillow. She grasped his upper arms before he could think to stop her, and began squeezing them gently, rubbing the muscles with her thumbs as she used her palms and lower fingers to apply rhythmic pressure. "You feel that?"

She couldn't mean the obvious answer-- of course he felt it, it was exquisite, he hadn't even realized his arm muscles were tense, but T'Laren wasn't in the habit of asking rhetorical questions and that was entirely too stupid a question to be anything but rhetorical if that was supposed to be the answer. So she meant something else. "What... exactly am I supposed to be feeling?" he gasped.

"You have a lot more muscle density in your upper arms than you did a few weeks ago."

"Surely... not strong enough to break a human arm. I'm _not_ some musclebound cretin."

"Being physically strong doesn't preclude intelligence, Q. My people believe that one heightens the other. Besides, I think the reason you were able to break Dr. LeBeau's arm had very little to do with strength." She released his arms and went back to his calves, working her way down to his feet.

"My leverage wasn't _that_ good."

She peeled off his right slipper, startling him. For a moment he wanted to protest-- being stripped of any of his clothing, even something as innocuous as a slipper, disturbed him. Then she started massaging the foot, using her thumb on the arch and fingertips on the top of the foot, working out yet more tensions he hadn't realized he had, and he decided he didn't want to protest after all. Instead, he rolled over, pulling his foot free of T'Laren for just long enough to turn himself face up, and then dumping it back in her lap with alacrity so she wouldn't think he was trying to stop her from doing this.

"When I taught you self-defense, I assumed that anyone who'd be trying to kill you, anyone you would need to defend yourself from, would be a trained killer. I wanted you to know how to disable someone quickly, before they had a chance to hurt you, so you'd have time to get away or call for help. To be honest, it never entered my mind that someone who _wasn't_ a trained killer would attack you that way." He thought perhaps she was really saying, "it never entered my mind that you'd be stupid enough to retaliate like that against someone who only slapped you," and he felt a surge of anger and guilt, but it was impossible to hold onto in the face of the exquisite sensations in his foot. "You broke Dr. LeBeau's arm because that's what I taught you to do." She sounded saddened. Perhaps she did feel guilty for what she'd done to him, after all.

"I don't think so... that wasn't what I was trying to do. I just wanted to stop her from hitting me."

"What exactly did you do?"

"I grabbed her arm and pulled it out of the way. I didn't mean to break it. I can't imagine how I did that."

She let go of his foot. Before he could complain, she had pulled the other one onto her leg, and began the same procedure she'd performed on the first foot. Q closed his eyes against another wave of pleasurable dizziness. Perhaps he was going to fall asleep right here.

"Tomorrow we'll go to the holodeck, and you can show me exactly what you did. We can figure out a way you can defend yourself against people you think might want to beat you up without hurting them badly should you have misjudged the situation. Sometimes it's very difficult to estimate a dangerous situation like that. You might think you're in no danger at all, and then someone hauls off and hits you. Or you might think you're in immediate danger of losing your life, and it turns out the other person was all bluster. The best thing to do is have a few techniques in your repertoire for stopping people without hurting them. Then if you need to hurt them after all to stop them, you still have the freedom to do that."

"Everyone automatically assumes I'm the villain," he said sulkily. "Even if I knew some way to stop people with hurting them badly, they'd probably throw me in the brig for attempted assault."

"It's a number of factors causing that, unfortunately. Your reputation doesn't actively include a tendency toward physical violence, but people don't think of you as either friendly or harmless. And I doubt you'd want them to. But that means, with your physical size, the fact that you're male, and the fact that you don't go out of your way to make allies, that if you get into a physical altercation with someone much smaller than you, or female, or especially both, it's going to be assumed that you're to blame. People can't actually see you for what you are, Q. They try to fit you into preconceived boxes. And there's a box for human men who are so miserable with their lives that they beat up human women. It's easier for them to put you in that box than it is for them to empathize with you, especially when you try to hide your own feelings of guilt and horror."

"Guilt? What do _I_ have to feel guilty about?"

"You didn't intend to hurt LeBeau, certainly not as badly as you did. You felt guilt for hurting her worse than you intended, and probably shame for stooping to physical violence at all. Didn't you?"

"You're the mindreader."

"No, I'm the mystery novel reader, remember?"

He smiled at that. "I thought you didn't find them enough of a challenge for you."

"Some are more challenging than others." She let go of his foot. "Turn over."

"Why?"

"So I can finish with your back."

He'd thought she _was_ finished, but wasn't about to complain. "Why do we have to go to a holodeck?"

"Because I don't want you breaking _my_ arm."

"Yes, but people have such tawdry little minds. If they think I'm in the habit of beating up women because I defended myself, what are they going to think if I go to a holodeck with you?"

"They'll think it's part of your therapy," T'Laren said dryly. "Q, I don't know where you got the notion that most people think the holodeck is for sex. Certainly, some people use it for that, but most of what it's used for is to recreate environments that people in space can't easily get to, or that wouldn't be particularly safe to create. Besides, not only does everyone know I'm your therapist, I'm a Vulcan. The notion that I might have sexual designs on you would be inconceivable to most people."

"But these people know you."

"Tris knows me, and he also knows I don't molest my patients."

"What about Sovaz?"

"Quite aside from the fact that Vulcans don't jump to unsupported conclusions about other people's sex lives, Sovaz is pre-pubescent. The notion that I would have sex with anyone other than her brother will simply never occur to her."

"_Pre-pubescent?_" Admittedly the girl was young, but how the hell had she gotten to be a lieutenant in Starfleet if she was _that_ young?

"We don't mature quite the same way humans do-- we develop into physiological adults before we mature sexually. It has to do with the development of telepathy, and certain natural cycles. Sovaz will start thinking about choosing a mate in the next five years or so."

"Oh." Not like he cared anyway. Q certainly did not find children sexually attractive, no matter how charmingly naive. Not that he found anyone sexually attractive, but if he did, he would be interested in people with considerably more maturity. Physical attractiveness and intelligence were simply not sufficient requirements. A certain degree of life experience would be required, and the ability to understand Q's wit... and the ability to give really good backrubs. Definitely would be a requirement. And... why was he thinking about this? With a start, Q yanked his mind away from the dangerous paths it had begun to wander down. It must be because he was tired. He'd had a strenuous day.

"I should have picked Vulcan," he mumbled. "You people don't jump to stupid conclusions all the time."

"You wouldn't have done very well as a Vulcan. You don't have the training and you don't have family. Humans without family are fairly normal, given the mobility of the human population; Vulcans without family are lost."

There was something wistful in her voice. Even as tired as he was, preoccupied as he was with his own problems, he couldn't miss that. "Personal experience?"

"My human mother is still alive, although she probably thinks I'm dead. Most of my Vulcan father's family still live."

Clearly, that wasn't enough. He couldn't understand why she kept rejecting Sovaz, then. He knew, now, what it was like to be alone. Despite himself, he felt an odd protectiveness toward her, born of gratitude-- she was isolated, too, and yet she spent her time trying to save him, instead of trying to put together the wreckage of her own life. How very foolish of her. How illogical.

"It wasn't your fault," he murmured.

"Pardon?"

"That they threw me in the brig. You couldn't have known that was going to happen."

Her fingers reached up to his temples and rubbed them. He sagged deeper into the bed, convinced that all his bones were gone. "Thank you," she said gently.

"For what?" he asked, suddenly embarrassed. If she was going to get mushy on him because he'd tried to reassure her that it wasn't her fault...

But she didn't answer the question, or acknowledge it in any way. The pleasurable dark dizziness overwhelmed him again, and this time he recognized it as the onset of sleep. "It's very late," she said. "How do you feel?"

He tried to answer that he felt fine, but he was too tired to muster up the strength to talk and so it came out as an unintelligible mumble. He couldn't sleep with her in the room, was fighting to stay awake against the dark tide. He didn't dare sleep with someone else in the room, even someone he trusted, otherwise he might get used to it and then he wouldn't wake up when they came in anymore. He had to enforce complete isolation when he tried to sleep, as lonely as it made him sometimes.

"That seems to have been effective," she said, a slight edge of amusement to her voice. "Good night, Q."

He was asleep before she even left.

* * *

The alarm was obviously malfunctioning. There was no way it should be ringing this early. Q turned it off.

He pointed out to Anderson that that was a really stupid place to put a red alert signal. Anderson gazed down at her boots. "You have a point," she reflected.

T'Laren came into the room. "Aren't you going to answer that?" she asked.

"There's no need," Anderson reassured her. "Starfleet never has anything important to say."

T'Laren didn't seem reassured. Instead, she turned to Q with an expression of concern on her face. "Q? Are you going to get up?"

Abruptly, with a sense of dislocation, he realized he was in his quarters, in bed. Why was T'Laren bothering him? It was far too early for him to get up. "Why?" he asked.

"Because it's 0928, and the conference starts at 1000."

Q rolled over to look at the chronometer. It could not possibly be 0930 already. He had just barely gotten to sleep.

"Can't I take a day off?" he mumbled. "This is supposed to be my vacation."

"You can do whatever you like, but you might want to think about whether you would rather go in today or not. People have undoubtedly heard all sorts of wild rumors by now. Do you think you'd want to go in and do damage control?"

She was right; if he didn't go in, people would probably embellish what had happened to him last night. Roth was an inveterate gossip, and probably would not be able to resist the temptation to tell everyone about Q's misadventures last night. On the other hand, the very fact that he would have to face people who knew about last night made him want to curl up and stay asleep for the next several weeks, at least.

Suddenly a brilliant plan occurred to him. "No, I think I'm going to be working here today," he said, in as lofty a voice as he could manage, still bleared by sleep. "The conference has been entertaining enough, but I've been spending entirely too much time with intellectual inferiors, and they're dragging me down. I think I'll spend today here, getting some _real_ work done."

"As you wish," T'Laren said. "I'll call and tell them you're working at home today." Sadly, she would probably not add the embellishments. But that was all right-- after he'd enacted his plan, no one would be concerned with the incident last night anymore.

Q nodded and closed his eyes. Hadn't it been something like 0400 before he'd finally gotten to sleep? Of course he couldn't be expected to go to the conference today.

"I'm going down to the holodeck to practice. If you need me, just call."

"Delightful," Q murmured. The warmth of the blankets around him was seductive, calling him to curl back into them and give up the strains of wakefulness.

* * *

Hazy, dreamlike excitement at the thought of his plan warred with sleep all morning. Finally, Q pulled himself out of bed in early afternoon, unable to stay in bed any longer, though he wanted to. He actually had something he wanted to do today. What a novel concept. He hadn't felt any sort of excitement, any sort of desire to get up in the morning to accomplish something, since... the Borg. A moment of depression and self-pity seized him at that-- his life had truly been that miserable for two whole years? But he pushed it aside. Time to work.

He pulled up the notes from the conference, showing all the tests that had already been run, and the silly hypotheses that went with them. Time travel? Alternate dimensions? Alien warp drives? What _was_ this silliness? Didn't these people have a gram of common sense? He didn't know quite what the anomaly was, but nobody was in the correct ballpark.

* * *

When T'Laren showed up, toward late afternoon, he was pacing around the common room., occasionally directing commands to the computer, mostly talking to himself. T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "Q?"

"...would have had the wrong... what's the word, damn... no, anyway, that's the wrong direction... what about the erdionic signature? Undoubtedly didn't check that... yes! Computer, display all analyses of erdionic waves from the singularity."

"No analysis of erdionic waves has been conducted."

"What utter morons... shouldn't be surprised, though..."

"Q?" T'Laren repeated.

"Hmm?" He turned and seemed to notice her for the first time. "What are you doing here?"

"I live here," T'Laren said dryly. "Have you eaten?"

"Why would I have eaten? It's far too early."

"It's 0622," T'Laren said patiently. "Have you eaten at all today?"

"It can't be that late. It was barely 0200 just a few minutes ago. Are you sure the chronometer isn't wrong?"

"You haven't, have you." She had never seen Q like this, totally focused on a problem. "Why don't you get something to eat?"

"I'm not hungry. Did you know those morons didn't run a _single_ analysis on erdionic waves?"

"What's an erdionic wave?"

"Similar to a veritonic wave, but the amplitude is a lot higher and the flavor is a bit more greenish."

She was _not_ going to ask him what that meant. "Did they run analyses on the veritonic waves?"

"Wouldn't help. Veritonic waves are strictly three-dimensional creations. Erdions have a propagation pattern in the fourth and fifth dimensional axes as well... well, actually, maybe you have a point. If we compared the frequency of veritonic waves to the erdionic... but we'd need an erdionic analysis for that... damn. Who do I go to get tests run around here?"

"Sovaz is the liaison to the ship's science department, so I would imagine you would talk to her."

"Good. Computer, locate Lt. Sovaz."

"Lieutenant Sovaz is in Conference Room 7."

"They're still _at_ that?"

"Q, you should eat," T'Laren repeated patiently. "The tests can wait until after dinner."

"I told you I'm not hungry. Q to Sovaz."

"Sovaz here," his combadge chirped.

"Sovaz, I need a 12-hour scan run for erdionic waves."

"What are erdionic waves?"

Q looked shocked, and somewhat dismayed. "Tell me you're joking."

"Vulcans don't joke," Sovaz said. There was a voice in the background. "Oh, Dr. Markow is explaining them to me."

"And you're supposed to be the liaison to a conference of _physicists?_"

Murmuring in the background for half a minute. When Sovaz returned, her voice said, "Dr. Markow says that erdionic waves were discovered only four months ago."

"Discovered by Federation types, you mean. Yes, I know. I was there. I wouldn't call it 'discovered', exactly, not when I practically had to spoon-feed it to them."

"We don't have equipment that can detect erdionic waves, I don't think. I'll check with Commander Mariani."

"Oh, for-- You're supposed to be a state-of-the-art science vessel! How can you possibly not have this equipment?"

"We had our last refit six months ago," Sovaz said. "Is there equipment that can detect erdionic waves on Starbase 56? Possibly we can download the design specifications and replicate or build the detector here."

Q sighed heavily. "I'm not interested in your petty little technical problems. It is beyond unbelievable that no one thought to run this scan. I want it by tomorrow morning." He tapped his combadge off. "Can you believe this? They don't even have a _detector_. What am I even _bothering_ for?"

"Q, starships can't go in for a refit every time someone comes out with a new discovery," T'Laren pointed out. "And if erdionic waves were only discovered four months ago, with your help, it seems only natural that you would be more familiar with them than anyone here."

"Why am I bothering to impart my knowledge to the Federation if four months later supposed physicists _still_ don't know what I'm talking about?" He paced furiously.

"Members of Starfleet science are usually more generalists and less specialized than civilian scientists. Sovaz has an enormous quantity of information to try to keep current with. It is hardly her fault if one or two things slip through the cracks."

"And what are you defending her for? I thought you didn't like her."

"Why do you say that?"

"Well, if you treat people you _like_ the way you treat Sovaz, I don't see why you don't have a reputation much like mine."

T'Laren decided to ignore that. She walked over to the replicator; Q wasn't going to eat if she didn't put the food in front of him. "One bowl of ri'keyh. One omelette, three eggs, with mushrooms, peppers, and steak bits. One fizzy chocolate and one grape juice."

"I _said_ I'm not hungry."

"I suspect that if you start to eat, your appetite will return." She set the plates and glasses down on the table-- chocolate drink and omelette for Q, vegetable casserole and grape juice for her. "I don't dislike Sovaz, Q. I would simply rather not deal with her."

"Why not? What'd she do to you?"

"She did nothing to me." _It was what I did to her_. "Seeing her evokes painful memories that I would rather put behind me." She seated herself and began to eat.

With some degree of bad grace Q sat down as well. "I might as well," he muttered. "Since they're holding me up with their incompetence, I don't have much better to do."

"Tell me what you've found."

"Why bother? You wouldn't understand it."

"I won't understand the details, no, but I should be able to pick up enough to get a general sense."

"T'Laren, people need advanced degrees to be able to pick up enough of what I tell them to have some idea what I'm talking about. I don't do well on talking to laypeople."

Perhaps he had a point. But she didn't really want to know what he'd found; she wanted him to talk to her about his interests, to share his excitement in his incomprehensible discoveries with her, to tell her what actions he was taking. "Then tell me what you've been doing instead. In a general sense."

"I came up with a brilliant plan this morning," Q said, attacking his omelette as if it had just tried to bite him.

"Your plan to sleep in and announce that you were working at home?"

"My plan to not come back to the conference until I actually know the answer. If I can solve the anomaly, no one's going to _care_ about the incident with LeBeau anymore. But I'm being hampered by a lack of data. You know, this is the third test I've had to have them run? What do these people think they're _doing?_"

"Part of the entire reason you were invited to the conference is so that you could help them to determine what sort of scans would be useful to run."

"Yes, well, obviously someone's got to."

"How far have you gotten?"

"I have a very good idea of what it's not. Actually, I do have a vague hypothesis about what it might be, but it's possible that's just wishful thinking. Until I get the erdionic wave scans back, I won't have enough evidence to even begin pursuing my vague hypothesis."

"What do you think it might be?"

Q's combadge cheeped at him. "Q here."

"Commander Mariani's altered the sensor array so it should be able to pick up erdionic waves," Sovaz's voice said. "We're beginning the scan now."

"Lovely."

"What is this for? Do you have a theory? None of us have been able to figure out what erdionic waves should have to do with the anomaly."

Q grinned coldly. "No, I don't imagine you would."

"So what is your theory?"

"I'll leave you to ponder that overnight. Q out."

"That was rather cruel," T'Laren pointed out.

"T'Laren, you wound me. I'm merely raising levels of anticipation. Now they have something more interesting to gossip about." He pushed his chair back and got up. "Now, I do have to get back to work if I'll be ready for tomorrow. So why don't you run along and find something to do?"

Instead of running along and finding something to do, T'Laren watched Q, under pretense of reading. She sat curled up on the couch with the datapadd, watching him pace and talk to himself. He kept picking bits of abandoned omelette or mushroom off his plate and eating them every time he passed the table; T'Laren had the bright idea of replicating fruit, cheese, crackers and pastries and leaving most of the stuff on the table, while she returned to her post on the couch with a small sampling of it. Sure enough, Q would pick up bits of the appetizers and absently snack while he paced, too engrossed in his own thoughts to quite realize that he was eating. She had just figured out how to get Q to eat more. Now, if she could only find a way to trick him into exercising, things would be wonderful.

* * *

The results of the scan came in at 0700 hours. Q hadn't been up the whole time, of course; he kept getting up in the middle of the night and going to check, as the results of the scan would determine whether he went in to the conference tomorrow.

As he'd hoped, the concentration of erdionic waves radiating toward and from the anomaly was effectively doubled. He ran another analysis while he got dressed, and determined that half the radiation in the area was most likely a fifth-dimensional reflection of the other half. Which meant... Excitement bubbled over in him. Not only did he think he knew what it was, but he could even imagine a plan to investigate further. He didn't know why he'd never thought of this in the old days, why no one had, but perhaps it was a matter of perspective; only a creature reduced to the level of a barely evolved sentient could conceive of a plan so primitive, so low-tech.

Waiting for the conference to re-open at 1100 drove him nuts. Waiting the additional fifteen minutes to be fashionably late was out of the question. He strode into the conference room only five minutes after it had begun, before the meeting had even been called to order, and clapped his hands. "If you're all done blathering about your tedious little social lives, I have something important to show you."

Every head turned toward his. "As important as breaking defenseless women's arms?" LeBeau asked, unable to let him go without trying for her pound of flesh.

Q sneered at her. "Your tedious harping on my part of a distasteful incident that you yourself caused is irrelevant to the purpose of this conference. But let's put it to a vote. Would people rather hear LeBeau whine, or would you rather find out what the anomaly is?"

"You know?" Markow leaned forward, almost imperceptibly, but Q knew him well enough to know that that much motion cost him the effort that leaping up and shouting would cost an uninjured person.

"The analysis of erdionic waves was the key, wasn't it?" Sovaz asked, all but bouncing. "I've thought and I've thought, and I still cannot envision what erdionic waves could be telling you."

Yalit-- who was mercifully wearing a loincloth, at least-- grinned toothily. "You talk big, boy," she said. "Let's see if you can back it up."

"Boy?" Q glared at her. "Madame, we've discussed this, I believe. Your species was still so much primordial sludge when _I_ was a child."

"I read your files," Yalit said, undiscouraged. "You're some kind of adolescent by your own standards, aren't you? Boy."

"Perhaps I am. Troll. But it's hardly relevant in _your_ species' terms, now is it?"

"Shut up, Yalit," Dhawan said. "And Q, quit rising to the bait. She's got a point. Let's see if you're worth the nuisance you've caused."

"Computer! Crosstab analyses of all radiation scans performed on the singularity, compared against ambient for open space." This was a reasonably common sort of request, and the holographic display in the center of the room lit up with charts and graphs. "You will notice an emergent pattern, if you look carefully. Let's examine one comparison more closely. Computer! Compare veritonic to erdionic radiation, with the third axis being ambient."

The chart popped into existence, causing the other charts to become smaller and crowd down at the bottom of the display. The comparison was clear-- veritonic waves were slightly less than ambient, while erdionic radiation was nearly double both its own normal ambient levels and the adjusted current levels of veritonic radiation.

"I was wondering about that," someone said. "Why there's such a big discrepancy."

Q smiled broadly and turned to the speaker, a human man whose name entirely escaped him. "Any hypotheses?"

"Well, I looked for high-amplitude radiation effects-- as if the gravity gradient is not affecting higher-amplitude radiation at all-- but I didn't see anything."

"And you didn't investigate further?" Q purred maliciously.

The man flushed. "I didn't have time. The erdionic scan results just came back this morning."

"It couldn't be the gravity dragging in more low-freq, though," Roth said. "Because that wouldn't explain why the erdionic wave concentration is _double_ ambient. Right?" He looked to Q eagerly, like a puppy expecting praise.

Q was a hard pet owner, though. "So, any brilliant hypotheses, Harry? We want explanations, not more questions."

"Well..."

Roth was rescued by Yalit, probably inadvertently. "What's the matter, don't _you_ know?" Yalit asked nastily. "Why don't you just tell us instead of pretending this is a lecture hall?"

"What do _you_ think it is, a marketing presentation?" Q snapped back. "I'm not here to spoonfeed you answers, troll. Yes, I could stand up here and tell you about all the Secrets of the Universe, and you would smile and nod politely, and take notes, and probably fail to understand a fraction of a percent of what I was saying. I would far rather make you actually think for yourselves, since I'm _told_ you're evolutionarily equipped to do that, though I'm sure someone would make an exception in your case, and then you might at least have a remote chance of understanding it. Not that you, personally, have any chance at all, in my opinion."

"Can we keep the personal remarks out of this?" Dhawan snapped. "We're well aware you don't like Yalit, Q. No one likes you, either, but they at least behave civilly."

Q smiled mockingly at her. "Lt. Dhawan. If I did that, what _would_ become of my reputation?" He turned back to Roth, having deliberately dragged his feet a bit with gratuitous insults to give Harry time to come up with something, the only mercy he would grant. "Well, Dr. Roth? Dazzle us."

"Something in the nature of the singularity is causing high-amplitude wave forms to be reflected," Harry said. "So erdionic waves and other sigma-level hi-freqs are turning up as double ambient."

"Oh, Harry." Q put on a disappointed face. "So very close... and yet so very, very far away."

"What about the netrimic radiation?" Milarca asked. "That's a sigma, but it's not doubled."

"What _about_ the netrimic radiation? Answers, people, answers. Questions are easy."

"Computer," Morakh said, "maximize the lower graphs."

"Bonebrain!" Q exclaimed delightedly. "Have you caught onto something?"

"Tone it down, Lucy. You're being ridiculous," Markow said.

"Fine, Daedalus, _you_ want to get up here and do it? I'm sure _you_ know exactly what the anomaly is, now that I've shot down your silly theory about time travel."

"Where related wave forms are discrepant, such as veritonic or erdionic, it seems that there's a dimensional propagation issue," Morakh said. He called up graphs of several other groupings of related wave forms. "Erdionic waves have a fifth-dimensional propagation pattern. Veritonic waves, while related, propagate only in the third dimension. But veritonic waves are displaying normal ambient levels, and erdionic waves are doubled. Therefore the singularity must be radiating fifth-dimensional waveforms itself."

"Ohhh. For a moment there, I thought you were going to transcend your species' normal stupidity," Q said, mock-disappointed. "I guess not though."

"Look at the graph," Markow said. "Veritonic radiation is _not_ equal to ambient levels. It's less. And the cutoff isn't fifth-dim propagators. Waveforms propagating in the fourth and sixth are showing the same patterns as erdionic waves."

"And?" Q prompted.

"So. The singularity is reflecting waveforms in the fourth, fifth and sixth dimensions, and absorbing waveforms that are tridimensional or less. Nothing we've scanned has any higher than a sixth-dimensional pattern, so there's no way to tell if the pattern holds at higher dimensional levels, but it looks as if the singularity is only _absorbing_ lower-order radiation, and everything else is being reflected. That's obvious."

"Obvious. Sure. I knew that," Roth muttered.

"But why?" Sovaz asked. "What's causing such an unusual pattern?"

"An excellent question," Q said, beaming at her. He turned to Markow. "You ruined it, Daedalus. You should let someone else answer the questions once in a while."

"I wasn't in the mood for your theatrics. Get on with it."

Q nodded, and went over to the lightboard, drawing out an equation on it. He had figured out the equation for the first time last night, this being the first time he'd had need to. The numbers were so cold and impersonal, trying to pin down a transcendent concept. "Anyone here recognize this?"

Everyone stared. It was Markow who finally said, "No."

"It looks..." Elejani Baíi hesitated. "I thought for a moment it might be a descriptor of telepathic radiation, but it's not, is it?"

"This," Q said, "is a wave-form beyond the science you've achieved thus far. It's low-order, as these things go, but this wave-form propagates _n-_dimensionally. With enough power behind it, it's theoretically capable of propagating through an aleph-null order of dimensional levels. In fact, no one has that kind of power available, but I've seen these waveforms cross as many as two hundred dimensional orders."

"But what good is it?" Dhawan asked.

"Pardon?" Q stared at her. "Did you just ask me what _good_ a physical aspect of the universe is? As if the entire universe was designed specifically for _your_ benefit, Lt. Dhawan?" He turned to his audience with an overblown expression of disbelief. "And they call _me_ arrogant!"

"No, I _meant_ what relation does it have to what we're trying to accomplish here," Dhawan said. "It's very lovely, Q, but why are you bringing it up _now? _That's what I'm asking."

"Because, my dear, we can use this to test my theory."

"Oh, so it's a theory, not a fact?" Yalit asked nastily.

"What _is_ your theory?" Morakh growled.

Q paced. "There are... areas... of the universe where space has been contorted into a little knot. Sort of a Klein bottle, actually. A kind of barrier exists around the edges of these places that is impervious to all but the lowest orders of radiation. Basically, kinetic energy can get through, and gravitic radiation, and _nothing else_. No electromagnetism, no subspace radiation... It absorbs lower-order radiation and reflects radiation in higher dimensionalities. If you try to use the fourth or fifth dimensions to circle around the barrier, to a time and/or universe where it didn't exist, you end up being... reflected. Not a pleasant experience, or so say those who have tried.

"The form of radiation I have described to you can go _anywhere_. Literally. By its very nature it modulates the locons and chronons it intersects. There is no barrier that is impervious to that wave-form on the board there, _except_ the barriers of an Anomaly."

"What is the radiation called?" Sovaz asked.

"Well, it doesn't have a name, obviously. Not in _your_ language. My people just call it by what it is, but then we have that option, being telepathic and all."

"I vote we call it a Q-uon!" Roth said brightly. He grinned up at Q. "After all, you discovered it and all."

Under normal circumstances, Q would have said that was the stupidest thing he had ever heard, given how often he had identified new particles and such to the Federation. Under these circumstances, however, given the nature of the waveform he had just described, it was entirely appropriate. "While I find your notion that you can name parts of the universe after your small little selves mildly offensive, in this case I accept. We'll call it a quuon."

"Because it's _your_ name that's being proposed?" Milarca asked coolly.

"No, because it's my species that's being proposed. And given what this particular waveform _is_, I find that curiously apropos."

"What _is_ this particular waveform?" Sovaz asked.

"That's not relevant to the discussion," Q said loftily. "What is relevant is this: because these... quuons... can go anywhere except through the Anomaly barrier, they are a certain way to determine if my theory is actually correct." He was actually positive his theory was correct, or he would never have mentioned it; scientists did have a distressing tendency not to want to take his word for it, though. "If we could generate a small burst of these with the specified parameters, and fire it at the singularity, we could then determine if it had been reflected or not. If it _had_, it would prove my hypothesis."

"Which is? You described an anomaly; that tells us just as much as saying it's a singularity. What is the nature of this anomaly? What causes it?" Milarca asked.

This was, of course, beyond the ability of the mortals in the room to guess at. Q launched into a lecture on the Anomalies, failing to mention that what he was telling them was actually itself only a theory, albeit a theory devised by a people with a far more advanced science than they could possibly imagine. The Continuum had never managed to explore the insides of the Anomalies. Being entities of energy, they could not get through the barrier, however they tried-- and while a few actually _had_ gotten through the barrier, none had ever returned or reported. And no wonder. The waveform that Q had just permitted to be labeled with his name was the substrate of communication within the Continuum; since it was reflected by the Anomaly barrier, no one _could_ get a message through. But Q had a plan, breathtakingly simple and abysmally low-tech, something his people had not been able to devise in a billion years. It would be an enormous coup for him if _he_ managed, in his lowly form, to succeed at something that the rest of the Continuum had failed at; possibly they'd be grateful and impressed enough to take him back, and if not, it would at least be a slap in their faces, that he had done what they in their loftiness could not do.

He wrapped up his lecture. "So, effectively, the Anomaly appears to be--"

"This is total crap," the Tellarite interrupted.

"Excuse me?" Q was _not_ accustomed to being interrupted in this fashion.

"This story you're telling is great, but it doesn't relate to the singularity we're seeing. There's no way to test if your Anomaly and our singularity are the same thing."

"I _told_ you," Q said, frustrated beyond belief. "We observe the behavior of the quuonic radiation--"

"With what?" the Tellarite barked, laughing. "I did the math. To build a detector that would even be able to observe if any of these were in the _area_, let alone what the concentration is and where they're coming from, would require the power of, oh, about six stars going supernova at once. To generate a _pulse_ of these things would require several _dozen_ stars. And that's assuming you can channel 100% of the star's energy; with our current technological levels, we could channel maybe ten percent. Got several hundred spare stars lying around?"

"Dr. Gan's right, " Sovaz reported. "I've reconfirmed his analysis. The power requirements to detect a quuon, let alone generate it, are far beyond our current technological capability."

Q blinked. For the first second, he merely thought, _Well, that makes sense. _Surely these primitives wouldn't have the capacity to generate a wave form that could communicate with the Continuum. What had he been thinking? And then utter humiliation washed over him as he realized he'd done it again. Despite all he'd studied of these people's pathetic excuse for science, he still made embarrassing missteps like this every so often, believing they could do something that they quite obviously could not. "Well. I suppose I should have guessed that. You people have _such_ primitive technology."

"So all this is useless?" Dhawan asked angrily. "We don't even have a way to _test_ your theory?"

"I didn't say that," Q said sharply. "There's another way to test it... I was _planning_ on using this method to do some exploratory research once we'd confirmed my theory, but we could use it to confirm the theory in the first place, I suppose."

"Which is?" Markow asked. "Most of us don't have all eternity."

Q sighed. "So terribly impatient. That's always been your downfall, Markow." He began to pace again. "The nature of the Anomaly is that it's impervious to all forms of energy _but_ kinetic. And gravitic, but that doesn't count right now. What we need to do is configure a probe such that it turns off all electronic systems just before it reaches the barrier, and coasts through; then turns itself back on again, based on some sort of timer that uses a kinetic energy system--"

"There's no such thing," someone objected. "How can you have a timer that uses solely kinetic energy?"

"Clockwork," Malo Ren, the Bajoran scientist said. That shut everyone up for a moment.

"Exactly. Clockwork. It should turn itself back on again, re-initialize, take readings, save them in a hard form-- one that doesn't require the presence of any form of energy to retain the information-- turn around, coast back out, turning itself off again for the barrier crossing, and then turning back on and warping back through the radiation front around the anomaly to return here."

"Could people be sent?" Sovaz asked excitedly.

Q shrugged. "I don't know. Some of us tried picking up mortal ships and sending them coasting through the Anomaly barriers, but none of them ever returned either."

"My God." Anne Christian's eyes went wide. "You're _all_ monsters."

Belatedly Q realized that perhaps that hadn't been the smartest thing to tell them. "I never saw the point myself. The Anomaly was simply not interesting enough to warrant that much effort, and I said so. But you know some people."

"The Q are energy beings, aren't they?" Elejani Baíi asked. "Have your people never managed to cross the Anomaly either?"

"I don't see why it's any of your business," Q snapped. He didn't much like talking about the Continuum, and mentioning something that would make them look bad, something they had actually failed at, was not something he much wanted to do.

"Well, that would be something, wouldn't it?" Roth said. "If we lowly mortals managed to pull off something that the Q Continuum couldn't manage..."

"I would be very surprised," Q retorted.

"So you don't think this will work?" someone asked.

Q shrugged. "Implementation isn't my department."

"Well. It's worth investigating," Dhawan said. "We'll contact the Engineering Department."

* * *

After the conference ended for the day, Q did not even reach the door before he was mobbed by people wanting to know more about his Anomaly. He was dangerously close to shouting at all of them to go away and leave him alone when Harry Roth swooped in and rescued him. "Q! Sorry to interrupt, folks, but we have dinner plans."

_We do? _He managed not to say it, perceiving that Harry was rescuing him. "So sorry, but a higher duty calls," he said mockingly to the mob, and pushed his way through them. "Lovely. Where did you make reservations?"

Roth grinned. "This is a starship, Q," he said. "Not a lot of variety in places to eat." He led Q over to where a small party of folks, including Elejani Baíi and Sovaz, were waiting. Q's heart sank.

"Harry, you didn't tell me this was a _group_ invitation."

"We've made a collective decision to take you out to dinner. You have been assimilated. Resistance is futile; dinner is inevitable."

"There hardly seems a point, given the paucity of restaurants on a starship."

"I could always cook," Elejani Baíi suggested, amused.

Q shuddered. "_No_ thank you. You people are sufficiently stagnant that I suspect your cuisine hasn't changed in 3,000 years, and I have no desire to experience it again."

Sovaz looked puzzled. "I thought that you did not eat when you were still omnipotent."

"Didn't anyone ever tell you that Vulcans should be seen and not heard?"

Sovaz' puzzled look deepened into bewilderment. "No..."

"So where shall we go?" Roth asked. "Ten-Forward, Ten-Forward or Ten-Forward?"

"There are other places to dine on the _Yamato_," Sovaz pointed out. "Most other locations are cafeteria-style, however."

Q had a brilliantly cruel idea. He was not happy with being dragged into a business dinner with a group of five people, two of whose names he'd forgotten; eating in public was a humiliating experience for him, a reminder of how far he'd fallen, that he was mortal clay and needed to eat just like the rest of these. But there was a way to pass on the pain. "Harry, you forgot to invite someone," he pointed out. He located Markow, who was sensibly waiting until the crowds of people knotting up and chatting by the door cleared, and strode over to him. "Daedalus! I'm being suborned for dinner purposes; any interest in coming along?"

"We would be delighted to have you," Sovaz said earnestly, probably completely unaware of how humiliating Markow found the process of eating in public.

"Is this business or idle gossip?" Markow asked.

"Do I look like the sort that would indulge in idle gossip?" Q asked lazily. It was not often he could get Markow's goat; it would infuriate the man to miss a discussion like this, but Q was sure he would be unwilling to accept a dinner invitation.

Markow studied him with his usual inscrutable, damaged expression, unable to make his face convey the subtlety of whatever he was feeling, which was annoying. It was hard for Q to perceive when he was really getting to Markow, because the man's voder produced a fair degree of monotone and his face could convey only extremely crude, broad expressions. "In that case, I accept," Markow said, surprising Q.

"Really! How delightful." He wanted to ask why Markow had changed his mind, but it would be bad form to admit that he had remembered how uncomfortable Markow was eating in public.


	4. 3b: Yamato

* * *

Q spent the next three hours holding court, picking at food while grandiloquently holding forth on the nature of the universe. This was actually a lot of fun. The six people here with him all respected and liked him to some degree or another-- the two he hadn't known, a Vulcan named Stamor and a human named Eva Velasquez, turned out to be people who had never met him in person but had been on the list to see him, and who had both been reasonably impressed by his work here. It was almost like the work against the Borg, when Roth and some of the other scientists had started dragging him off to lunch every day so that he wouldn't pass out from forgetting to eat. He might have feared that they would be slavishly worshipful-- he hated that-- but Markow saved him from that, treating him with just enough disrespect that the others didn't grovel. Millennia of experience had made Q sufficiently sick of being worshipped that even now, after having been hated and despised and treated as an object for three years, he couldn't quite get into that.

He didn't get much to eat, though; he'd been too busy talking to actually stop and eat anything. This wouldn't have been a problem in the old days, but Q had found himself with a lot more desire for food since leaving Starbase 56... perhaps part of it was that he was now allowed to have knives, and cut his own food, without the suicide restrictions he'd been operating under for two years. Eating was a lot more pleasurable when it didn't remind him of the minor little freedoms that had been stripped away from him. How could he have ever lived that way? Why hadn't he protested more loudly, why hadn't he struggled harder? The emptiness of the past two years was unbelievable when he contrasted it with how he felt now-- he had merely changed location, nothing more dramatic than that, and yet the way people treated him in comparison was nothing short of marvelous.

Rather drained, he made his way back to his quarters. T'Laren stepped out of her bedroom into the main room as soon as he came in. "I suppose you're too tired to demonstrate the incident with Dr. LeBeau to me," she said.

"However did you guess?" Q slumped in the nearest chair. He really had to get these restrictive clothes off. And get something to eat. But he was so tired...

"We should do it tomorrow. The hearing has been set for tomorrow at 1500 hours; I took the message for you."

"What, are you my secretary now?"

"I doubt you'd want that; I lose files on a fairly frequent basis."

Q grinned at that image. "I take it LeBeau would not be persuaded to drop the charges."

"You take it correctly. Q, I wanted to talk to you about this." T'Laren walked over in front of him. "Strategy is going to be very important tomorrow. We should discuss how to handle the hearings."

"I was right and she was wrong. What's to discuss?" He really didn't feel like dealing with this right now.

"Don't be foolish. This is too important." She sat down on the couch, turned toward him. "Why don't you get changed and relax a bit, and we'll discuss what we need to do tomorrow?"

He glared at T'Laren, more than a bit resentful that she was making him do this now... but he _was_ uncomfortable. "If you insist," he said with a long-suffering sigh.

After he'd changed clothes and washed up, he felt a bit more capable of handling whatever inanity T'Laren was planning to spout. He grabbed a danish from the replicator and devoured it so that he wouldn't have to admit in front of her that he was actually hungry, and left the room when he was done, wandering out into the common room and setting himself down on the couch, where he proceeded to lounge across the entire length of it. The danish hadn't helped much; he was still hungry.

"How did your dinner expedition go?" T'Laren asked him.

"Entertainingly," Q said, sitting up. This gave him an excuse. "I didn't get to eat much, though; people kept asking me questions."

"But you enjoyed yourself?"

"As I said, it was entertaining. And I don't get much of that nowadays." He walked to the replicator. "Shrimp omelette on toast, and fizzy chocolate." Feeling some obscure need to justify himself, to point out that he wasn't simply being a pig, he added, "I can't exactly eat and lecture at the same time. It looks exceedingly stupid."

"You don't need to explain yourself, Q," T'Laren said. "You have every right to eat what you want, whenever you want."

He turned back to her, holding the plate with the omelette and the drink. "Unless I'm not eating enough for your tastes."

"Exactly," T'Laren said solemnly.

Q arranged himself in a lounging position on the couch again. "Or unless I'm eating meat in front of Sovaz?" he asked pointedly.

"I was wrong," she said simply, setting a plate of crackers, cheese and fruit bits on the table near the couch and then sitting on the chair diagonal from him. "I was discomfited by Sovaz' presence, and reacted poorly."

"Discomfited. I love that word. I suppose that's Vulcan for 'angry'?"

"Very well, I was angry." She shrugged. "Nothing comes without price. The price I have paid for my greater empathy with the needs of humans is a less effective emotional discipline than most Vulcans; occasionally I will get angry, to my shame. I was wrong to behave that way." She picked up one of the crackers. "However, we are not here to discuss my personal failings. We need to develop a strategy for the meeting tomorrow."

"I don't see why this is an issue," Q said. "I'll tell the truth, they'll see it was an accident, and the subject will be dropped. This is hardly Starbase 56." On Starbase 56, Q had been blamed for everything-- not that he'd ever had to go through a hearing of any sort, but if anyone got hurt in the attacks on the base, if anyone's feelings were injured when Q treated them with the contempt they deserved, if anyone felt slighted because Q had tromped all over their foolish little theories, Q had been blamed for it. That wouldn't happen here. On _Yamato_, people respected him and looked up to him and took him out to dinner. He hadn't had this kind of respect since working against the Borg, and it warmed his soul. Sure, there were some morons, like Dhawan and Yalit and Morakh and LeBeau herself, that didn't appreciate his superiority, but he had supporters, almost even friends. He wouldn't be railroaded and punished as Anderson would have done, not here. There was nothing for him to worry about. The business with him being put in the brig had just been a slight misunderstanding.

"No, it's not," T'Laren agreed. "But that is not necessarily to your advantage." She folded cheese and fruit into a little pyramid with a cracker. How disgusting. "On Starbase 56, you were a resource, not a person. You could be punished, and frequently were, for failing to meet your obligations as a resource. But it is very doubtful you would have been subject to the responsibilities of a person. If you had broken someone's arm there, I suspect Anderson would have covered it up, or talked the person out of pressing charges, because you were too valuable to lose time in rehab or doing community service. Here, though, you are merely another respected scientific luminary. They will not give you any sort of special treatment, for better or worse, because of your status. And given your track record of winning people to your cause... I would say this warrants a serious planning session."

Q's eyes narrowed. "I can take care of myself, T'Laren."

"Indeed. You did remarkably well with Dr. LeBeau."

"Sarcasm does not become you."

T'Laren leaned forward. "If you go in there and behave as you usually do, if you pretend you feel no guilt or remorse for what you did, place all the blame on Dr. LeBeau, call your judges morons, and act as if an accusation is tantamount to a judgment, they will throw the book at you. You may face time in the brig, or time on a rehab colony; you may be forced to perform some community service that you'd undoubtedly find demeaning, on some colony world where there's a shortage of manpower; and even if you're merely fined, there would be a black mark on your record that would for the next several years influence those you most need, people in security and law enforcement, to think the worst of you. You cannot afford to have any of those things happen."

Despite himself, her words evoked a chill in him. "It would never come to that," Q protested.

"Wouldn't it? Q, your less than stellar handling of humans once led you to be beaten near to death for having the temerity to need protection, and forced into a hunger strike to protest your own total dehumanization after you'd been driven to suicide. It may be a very comforting fantasy to believe everything's changed now and that could never happen again... but it isn't true. If you mishandle these people, you will suffer for it all out of proportion to the offense. Your human life shows that pattern over and over again."

The notion she believed that he, of all people, would prefer to live in a comforting fantasy infuriated him. "I keep my fantasy life well away from my assessment of reality, _thank_ you very much. And the fact is that I am not in as much danger as I was on the starbase. Here they respect me."

"That won't prevent them from sentencing you to a rehab colony if they think you're uncontrollably violent," T'Laren retorted. "Starfleet tries very, very hard not to play favorites. You have a lot more status than Dr. LeBeau. Therefore in the interests of fairness they will be biased _toward_ her in an attempt to avoid bias. If you then antagonize them, your fate would be sealed."

She was starting to scare him. Q knew well how that opposite-bias conundrum worked; he'd often used it himself, being deliberately harsh with the people he thought most promising, back when he'd had his powers. He could easily see this working against him now. "Very well. Since you're such an _expert_ on humans, what do you suggest?" he sneered, trying to hide his growing apprehension and belief in her words.

"I've noticed something interesting but puzzling about you. When you are in a situation where you're accused of something, your reaction seems to be fury that you weren't trusted-- you come across as if you're saying, 'Why should I bother to defend myself when you've already judged me guilty?' Yet when someone suggests that you might have performed a positive act, you try to minimize it-- as when Elejani Baíi revealed that you'd saved her planet, and you tried to make Markow and Roth believe that you'd tricked her into thinking so."

"What makes you think I actually _did_ do it? The Q are closely mentally linked; I have a lot of vivid emotional memories of things that other people did."

"None as vivid as your own memory, Q. You're too egotistical for that," she said dryly. "No, I'm quite sure Elejani Baíi was right-- it seems entirely in character for you to rescue a species under the guise of tormenting them. But why didn't you want to admit so to Roth and Markow?"

Q sighed, caught out. He heard the utter conviction in T'Laren's voice; no amount of lying, however sincere, would convince her otherwise. "Do you know how tedious it is to be thought benevolent?" he asked. "People are constantly worshipping you, supplicating you for this thing or that thing, make my crops grow, make my husband love me again, it's enough to make you ill. And then if you don't do it, they're disillusioned, and they whine. I much prefer to set up no illusions ahead of time; if you don't think I'm benevolent, you're not going to waste my time begging me for favors. And then if I _do_ choose to do someone a favor, they're properly grateful, instead of taking it for granted."

"I can understand that," T'Laren said. "It seems a sensible strategy for a god. But what ever does it have to do with your human life?"

"Habit?" Q shrugged.

"Your habits are deadly, Q. They apply to an existence so different from the one you have now that they are actively dangerous to you. Were I you, I'd set about cultivating new ones."

"Well, what was I supposed to do, say yes? Then it would have looked as if I'm even more egotistical than I am. I don't want people to think I'm the sort of person who goes about spreading peace and love throughout the galaxy."

"I could hardly see how they could be mistaken on that point."

"Ha ha ha," Q said sourly. "Keep it up, you'll develop a sense of humor yet."

"Right now the issue is not your desire to make your friends believe you a heartless villain. We'll deal with that some other time. The important issue is that you must appear innocent to the court tomorrow. It is not enough merely to _be_ innocent-- you must appear it as well. And that means that you _cannot_ behave as if the very accusation wounds you; you _cannot_ be sarcastic, flippant or cruel. Any time you think of something astonishingly witty and cutting to say, make yourself remember your time in the brig the other night, and hold your tongue. You cannot pretend that you don't feel guilt--"

"I don't."

"That's arguable. But for the sake of argument, in that case you must pretend that you _do_ feel guilt. This has all been a horrible accident, and you feel remorse for it--"

"But I don't."

"What kind of trickster god are you supposed to be?" T'Laren asked, visibly exasperated. "Even I, a Vulcan, am apparently better at lying than you are."

Q laughed, having successfully managed to get her goat. "Oh, that's precious, T'Laren. Remind me you said that the next time I'm depressed." He leaned forward, taking one of the crackers so he could wave it for emphasis. "I'm perfectly aware I'll need to put on an act, but I want it to be on _my_ terms. And I want it to be clear that the accident was LeBeau's fault. She started it; she paid the consequences."

"If you demonstrate remorse for what you've done, that is exactly what everyone will think," T'Laren pointed out. "LeBeau will be a cruel witch raking an innocent man over the coals over a simple accident that she herself precipitated. You may, when you're called on to describe the incident, tell how she came over and began harassing you, completely unprovoked. You may describe how she hit you. But describe these things without vindictiveness in your tone, and the judge will be impressed by how big-hearted you seem in comparison to LeBeau's pettiness."

"How often have _you_ had to manipulate courtrooms?"

"School boards, actually," T'Laren said. "I was in this very same situation when I was twelve."

"You broke a drunk woman's arm?" Q asked incredulously.

"No, I broke a teenage boy's. He was tormenting some younger students, and I politely asked him to stop. When he wouldn't, I interposed myself. He started pushing me-- he was careful not to hit me; in some places the human taboo against males striking females is particularly strong, and Texas is one of those places, but he might have injured me by shoving, since my greater physical strength doesn't provide me much protection against that-- I'm not as massive as a human of equivalent strength, and never have been. So I used a self-defense move to flip him, but applied a bit too much downward force, and snapped his arm. They nearly threw me out of the school for it-- a number of bigots had been trying to get me forbidden to go to school with human children in any case, and this provided ammunition. Even though it was clearly an accident, the claim was that a Vulcan child's greater strength makes her a threat to other students."

"So what did you do," Q asked, intrigued despite himself.

"At the hearing, I went into 'respectful obedient Vulcan child mode'-- I was polite, I was logical but not cold, I demonstrated remorse, but I used the cold dry facts to make my case for me, without any apparent attempt at emotional manipulation. People don't expect to be manipulated by a Vulcan anyway. So when I explained that he had been tormenting smaller children and I had stepped in to protect them, I won points for being the noble protector of those smaller than me. And when I explained how he had pushed me repeatedly, I painted him as a complete bully. Then my act of self-defense, for which I was so evidently remorseful, seemed fully justified. I was not penalized, but I did take it on myself to send my attacker flowers." She smiled slightly.

"With poisonous aphids inside or something?" Q asked, waiting for the punchline.

"No, no. Nothing like that was necessary. I was demonstrating my grace and class in a society that prized both, that I would send flowers to the boy I'd injured. People gossiped about how the little Vulcan girl had such _charming_ manners-- forgetting, I suppose, that the little Vulcan girl had far better hearing than their own children, since I overheard them with some frequency. There was nothing whatsoever he could do to retaliate, because I had stolen all the pity he thought he was owed in painting him as a bully who deserved what he got. And I let the facts do it for me."

Q raised his eyebrows, impressed despite himself. "Quite the little manipulator, weren't you?"

"I have developed a talent for being what people need me to be," T'Laren said. "In my profession, I use that talent to aid others, being what they need me to be to help them heal. But in my childhood, I freely confess I used it to get what I wanted. It wasn't entirely manipulation-- I couldn't have pulled a stunt like that if I hadn't been in the right. But if you try to be morally impeccable, and you try to give people what they need from you, it is very hard for them to betray you. The armor of the righteous really is quite sturdy."

"But chafing, I must imagine."

"It depends. I personally do not do things that I find chafing. If I were in a society whose moral strictures were far tighter than my own, perhaps I would, in order to fit in. But the level of moral behavior I feel comfortable with is an acceptable one for my society."

"So your society is perfectly blasé about you cheating on your husband?"

For a moment, he almost saw raw anger in her eyes. Then the mask slid down, hooding it, and he regretted his words. He'd gotten her good, no doubt about it, but it had been pleasant to have her being so open with him, sharing her trade secrets. Not likely to continue now. "What my husband and I chose to do in our marital life was not society's business," T'Laren said coolly. "Soram did not disapprove of my sexual escapades to any greater extent than he disapproved of my inability to control my emotions, my interest in humans, my illogical child-sitting practices, or my willingness to use my telepathy in the pursuit of my duty, rather than exclusively with family and friends. You've absorbed far more human social values than you know if you truly think my dalliances with other men were the real way in which I betrayed my husband."

"I have not," Q retorted. "_I_ don't care what you did. On the planet Prakta Velo, sex is completely casual, performed in public between any individuals who strike one another's fancy. But they won't eat together, or in public, and eating is shrouded in taboo and ritual as your species shrouds sex. If I wanted to get a Prakta Veloshian's goat, I might accuse him of eating _meat_ or eating in front of _children_. It doesn't mean _I_ care what or where he eats."

"Is it that important to you to try to hurt my feelings and anger me?" she asked. "I've been trying to figure out whether you do this as a defense mechanism, or if it's actually a way you show affection, or if in fact you simply harass everyone, regardless of their relationship to you and your opinion of them, for the pleasure of it."

"Oh, I do it for pleasure. Definitely."

"Perhaps you should pursue safer pleasures. For example, eating fugu or spacewalking without a tether."

"You must stop trying to be funny. It's just entirely too pathetic to watch."

"There is also the issue of gender and size," T'Laren continued, ignoring him. "It's unfortunate that you look and sound so human... The fact that you are male, and much bigger than Dr. LeBeau, would be of little significance if you were understood to be alien. Humans have a curious double standard; they will tolerate nearly any behavior from aliens, but reject certain behaviors in their own kind most strongly."

"Tell me all about it."

T'Laren appeared to be lost in thought. She focused on him slowly, as if an idea was dawning on her. "A costume..."

Q perked up. "What about a costume?"

"You dress like a human-- a well-dressed human, to be sure, but as if you do belong to human culture. If you could wear something that subtly reinforces your alien nature, that culturally you are _not_ human and should not be treated as one... something that doesn't look like human fashion."

"Any specific fashion tradition in mind?"

"Definitely not. You don't want to look as if you're imitating an established species, Q; you should dress as if whatever you're wearing is the native costume of your people... yes, yes, your people _have_ no native costume, I'm well aware of that."

He hadn't been going to say it-- far too obvious for him. But now that she'd mentioned it... "I _could_ simply not show up and claim I'm dressed noncorporeally."

"You can't do old Earth traditions either," T'Laren said, continuing to ignore him. "They'd be perceived as mockery, _as_ a costume. What you wear has to look like clothes... Do you think you can do it?"

"Of _course_ I can do it," Q said loftily, as if embarrassed to be in the presence of someone so stupid that she might doubt it. "There's nothing I can't do with clothing if I so decide."

"Excellent. I think we should go to the holodeck tomorrow morning, so you can try on costumes before we choose one to replicate."

Q stared. "I thought the pattern needed to be in the computer."

"Holodecks can alter patterns based on voice commands-- and occasionally keyboard input; some people do it that way-- and then you can download the pattern to a replicator. How did you think people made costumes?"

"In my experience people _don't_ make costumes. They walk around in the same stuffy Starfleet outfits all day."

"That's right; you don't use the holodeck. People will dress up for that."

"You're telling me that I could all along have used a holodeck to get the patterns I wanted? That I didn't have to program them into the replicators by hand?"

T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "If you did that, you have far more patience than I ever imagined. I did wonder why you felt the need to bring over all your clothes when you left Starbase 56, and why you brought half of them to _Yamato._"

"Well." Q studied the tray of crackers intently, mortified. "I suppose the technology _does_ have its uses."

"What you're going to have to do is appear completely innocent of the human taboo on hitting women. You transcend gender; you don't even notice it. And given how often you've been attacked by people smaller than you, the size differential means nothing. You can't mention it, though, or take great umbrage at being maltreated because you're a man; that part will have to come from me. Will you do that?"

Q was not paying attention, lost in planning his costume. "Q?" T'Laren repeated.

"What? Oh, yes. Listen, you said not flamboyant, right? But do you think red would be too flamboyant? I'm quite fond of red."

"Would you like to go to the holodeck and pick out your costume now?" T'Laren asked patiently.

He was tired, but there was no way he could sleep before he did this. "That sounds delightful." Q glanced down at himself. "But I can hardly go out in public dressed like this; I'm going to have to get dressed first."

"You're only going to the holodeck; must you put on an entire costume to do so?"

"Of course." Q stood up and headed for his room. "Actually, why don't I check to see if I have anything suitable already?"

"I'll come with you."

They sorted through all of Q's clothing, with T'Laren commenting on what she considered to be completely unsuitable for the purposes, too flamboyant, or otherwise flawed. Q protested at her complaints, of course, but secretly agreed with her on most of it; T'Laren's taste might be entirely too subdued for his taste, but she could tell fashions apart. Eventually they'd selected six outfits that _might_ be suitable, though Q had to try them all on to see. He kicked T'Laren out of the room.

"How exactly are we supposed to discuss strategy if you spend the next several hours getting dressed?" she asked dryly. "Do you expect me to sit by the com unit and talk through it?"

"What, would you rather stay in my room and stare at me while I'm getting dressed?" he retorted.

"Don't do the entire costume," she said with something very close to a sigh. "Just put on the clothes, Q; none of the elaborate makeup until we've decided whether it's appropriate, all right?"

Graciously he made that concession.

Foe the next two hours he tried on various items of clothing, and occasionally makeup jobs, while a bemused T'Laren provided moral support and fashion advice. None of the outfits were suitable, though T'Laren thought a few of them would do. There was no help for it but to go to the holodeck, wearing one of the outfits he had rejected-- they were fine outfits, just not suitable for what he wanted.

Three hours after that, he had something both he and T'Laren agreed was suitable, though he had wondered if T'Laren was still paying attention; she was sitting on the floor, legs drawn up against her chest, answering his questions with monosyllables. But then, the great T'Laren would hardly admit to something as _human_ as exhaustion, now would she?, Q thought gleefully, not tired at all. He'd caught his second wind, and would have gone on all night if he hadn't found something absolutely perfect.

It was vaguely like reptilian leather, a single-piece suit like a jumpsuit, but with interior support in all the right places. Soft and supple, black in its basic color but composed of beautiful iridescent scales, with a low-cut V-neck in front and a half-head high flaring ribbed collar in back, and real gold edging the collar and cuffs-- he had to wear a black turtleneck underneath it, of course, he couldn't very well expose his chest, or more precisely the padding he had to wear on his chest, but he thought that produced an interesting contrast. The interior of the high ribbed collar was also black, and velvety like the material of the turtleneck, swallowing light. He thought he looked rather regal when he leaned his head back against it. The boots and gloves he chose were made of the same material, but with even tinier scales and with a base color of gold rather than black. They were narrow, pointed and flaring, making his long, slender fingers even longer and his feet appear to be longer, narrower and more delicate than they were. With subtle alterations to the padding he usually wore to make him a bit closer to his natural weight, slender instead of painfully skinny, and a careful makeup job in green and gold, together with a single gold stud... Q studied his costume with delight. It was not something he might have chosen to wear under ordinary circumstances, as it made him appear slimmer than he usually liked-- if he had to err on one side or the other, Q would prefer to be thin, but his preference was to look intimidating if he could, and that called for a bit more weight. But it was definitely _not_ something your typical human would wear. Humans didn't wear leather, and human men didn't wear gold and green makeup. Not that Q's makeup job was particularly effeminate-- it just didn't look like something a human would wear.

T'Laren demonstrated how one downloaded holographic patterns into the replicator-- totally unnecessary, given that Q _did_ know his way around computer systems, but then he supposed the poor dear just wanted to prove she wasn't helpless around a computer. And then she insisted that he get some sleep. Quite ridiculous of her; at this hour, all Q needed were a few stimulants to keep going through tomorrow, whereas if he tried to sleep now, he would be mindless with exhaustion tomorrow. Since she wouldn't let him have the stimulants, though, he had little choice.

* * *

T'Laren had not been this exhausted in what seemed like years, and probably was. She had had to sleep rather than meditating last night, since Q had kept her up so late, but felt as if she had done neither-- her body was sluggish, almost as if she'd been drugged, and her head pounded. Not a good sign. She was not getting enough rest, or perhaps her body, tantalized by true dreaming, was starting to rebel against the regimen of meditation she had placed herself on. Even Vulcans needed to dream sometime, she had once told Soram. It was still true, but she was desperately hoping that "sometime" was not anytime soon.

She worked out a bit, stretching, trying to wake herself up. There was still planning to do for Q's hearing, which was in the middle of the afternoon. Which meant she would have to discuss it with him.

Q was hardly amenable to waking up, let alone getting ready for his hearing. There was no way he could go to the conference today, either, but at least people would put that down to him having to prepare, not oversleeping. T'Laren was fairly certain no one else was as cavalier about showing up as Q was. Admittedly, he had no scientific reputation to be threatened, but it was rude nonetheless.

Since he stubbornly refused to get up, T'Laren brought a coffee cup to his bedside and then proceeded to strip the bed. Q glared at her, but got the hint and sat up before she pulled the last sheet off him, gulping the coffee... she had learned back on _Ketaya_ that he preferred coffee cool enough to gulp when he was really tired, and would only get a hot cup after he already had some caffeine in his system. Caffeine was another thing she'd have to wean him off-- six cups of double-strength coffee in a day were a bad idea-- but one thing at a time.

She spent the rest of the day coaching him, trying to prepare him for the hearing by running practice question and answer sessions. At first Q seemed incapable of taking her seriously, and treated the whole thing like an elaborate game. As time went on, though, he got into it, until by the time of the actual hearing T'Laren felt reasonably confident he would not throw his future away for a witty remark. Or at least, as confident as one could ever be, with Q.

The hearing was a relatively informal thing, with Captain Okita presiding. Dr. LeBeau had shown up in her crispest professional attire, a mistake in T'Laren's opinion-- she should have portrayed herself as a weak innocent, not a competent, professional adult.

Q seemed to have taken T'Laren's coaching to heart-- he was sitting straight up, not lounging back in the chair as he usually did, and his expression was solemn. Either he was going to be fine, or he was going to do something spectacularly disastrous. It was hard to tell at this point which.

LeBeau's version of the story went first. She confessed to having had "a bit too much", and so when she went over to talk to Q, she granted that perhaps he might have misinterpreted her intent. "But he was vicious. He insulted me terribly in the course of our discussion, and finally said things no lady should have to hear. I was a little bit inebriated, as I said, and not in the best control of myself, so I slapped him. And that was wrong, I know it. I shouldn't have let my temper get away from me like that. But he _broke_ my _arm!_" Her voice rose. "This man claims violence is barbaric and beneath him-- how does he explain a violent overreaction like that? I wouldn't have expected that from a _Klingon_, and here is a member of a_ supposedly _advanced species assaulting people half his size."

Then they asked for Q's statement. Q stood up, seeming uncharacteristically subdued. "I'd like to say first of all that I deeply regret the injury to Dr. LeBeau," he said quietly. "I was trying to defend myself, but I never intended to injure her."

"Defend yourself from what, exactly?" Okita prompted.

This was the opening Q needed, and T'Laren saw him become more animated. "I was eating dinner with Dr. Roth, having a quiet discussion, when Dr. LeBeau came over and accosted me. She was more than a little inebriated, and though we offered to take her home several times, she refused. She insulted me in thoroughly vicious and unprovoked fashion-- I hadn't even _talked_ to her that night, yet she felt the need to attack my competence, call me a murderer, and make wholly unsupported allegations about my sex life." He shrugged, with a bit of a self-deprecating smile. "I've never been one to slink away from a good verbal battle-- I rather enjoy them at times, in fact. So I defended myself, quite wittily I might add. But I _never_ expected her to escalate to physical violence." He looked directly at Okita with his best sincere expression, focused and totally devoid of humor. "My people have a long tradition of verbal combat, longer probably than your species has existed. But we believe firmly that the response to words should be more words. We would _never_ think of attacking someone for their speech-- on the few occasions, once in a hundred millennia, when one Q has physically attacked another, it's _always_ been due to observable, harmful actions, _never _for words." He looked down again. "I suppose you could call me a slow learner, then, shortsighted, what have you... I've been physically assaulted for words a dozen times, some of them _by_ humans... once I was even almost killed by the humans who were supposed to be protecting me. But the barbarism of physical violence still comes as a surprise to me. _Certainly_ I don't expect it from a scientist, someone who is honored and respected for having higher faculties of mind than the normal run of your species."

"What exactly took place, Q?"

"Well, after our verbal combat had continued for some minutes, Dr. LeBeau made one of her wildly inaccurate suppositions about my sexual habits, as I mentioned. I retorted that her inordinate interest in my sex life was unwarranted, as I personally did not find her attractive in the slightest. For some reason, this pushed her over the line of rationality, and she hit me in the face, preparing to beat me up, I suppose." Q shuddered dramatically. "I've been beaten up before, as I said-- humans, Rigellians, Markasoids, and once a pair of Bajoran women nearly killed me in a bar on Starbase 56, for some sort of slight to their religion." T'Laren had specifically coached him to mention that incident in particular, since Bajoran women were no stronger or larger than human women, and it would reinforce the notion that Q had seriously feared LeBeau hurting him. "Dr. T'Laren's been training me in self-defense-- and I had no desire to be beaten up again. So I grabbed Dr. LeBeau's arm and pulled it away, so she couldn't hit me again-- and by accident, I broke her arm while doing so. And for inflicting that injury, I _am_ sorry, but I won't apologize for defending myself from an unprovoked physical assault."

"Unprovoked physical _assault_?" LeBeau asked. "I slapped you!"

"Exactly."

"But I'm half your size! I couldn't have hurt you if I wanted to!"

"Let's have some order here," Okita said mildly, but with a steely core to his voice. "Q, did you take into account your 'assailant's' physical size and strength in comparison to your own?"

"Why would I?" Q asked. "On paper, I suppose I'm physically stronger than most of the people who've assaulted me in the past." He glanced at LeBeau. "Physical strength has very little to do with it. Your people seem to think that it's acceptable to attack someone physically for a non-physical provocation that is entirely equivalent to the provocation that preceded it. What I said to LeBeau was no worse than what she said to me, but somehow she thought she had the right to hit me in the head for it. My head is arguably one of the more valuable items in the Federation, certainly the most valuable thing I own-- even the slightest damage to my brain could compromise my ability to do my job, and if I can't do that the Federation would have no reason to continue to protect me from my old enemies. An attempt to damage me there is nothing short of an attempt to kill me. And yet Dr. LeBeau believes that it was not only acceptable for her to hit me in the head, possibly causing concussive brain damage, but that she could hit me in the _face_\-- the most vulnerable and pain-sensitive portion of my head, causing me maximum pain and possibly facial scarring or blinding-- not only was this perfectly normal and acceptable for her to do, but that I was entirely outside the pale to defend myself from this assault."

T'Laren was proud of him. He hadn't whined or been self-pitying, and yet he had made it perfectly clear in a short period of time that he had had excellent reasons to fear LeBeau's attack, while painting himself as a morally superior alien who would never attack someone unprovoked and casting aspersions on any human who wrote off LeBeau's slapping him as minor. Phrasing the slap as "hitting him in the head" had been Q's own idea, and T'Laren had agreed to it-- once you got him going on the topic, Q could be quite inventive with verbal manipulation of any kind.

"Concussive brain damage? Facial scarring? You're making mountains out of molehills," LeBeau accused. "There's no way the slap I gave you would have damaged you."

"And how was I supposed to know that?" Q retorted. "For that matter, given that every _other_ time someone has hit me they proceeded to inflict grievous bodily harm, how was I supposed to know that that single blow was all you intended?"

"Order, please," Okita said, and everyone shut up, even Q.

T'Laren decided that Q had set the stage properly. "I'd like to speak on my client's behalf, if I may."

"Go ahead."

T'Laren stood. "Human beings, after approximately 8-12 years of development, acquire an exquisite sense of their own bodies, of the problems and possibilities these bodies present. An adult human has learned roughly how hard he can be hit before damage occurs, and what force he needs to apply to defend himself. We take it for granted that this is true of all adults, that it comes with maturity. It does not. It comes with experience. And Q has had only three years of experience with the human form.

"In that time, Q has never experienced a slap. He has been beaten, frequently and brutally, occasionally to the point of near-death. His life has been threatened on numerous occasions. And until recently, he has never had the vaguest idea of how to stop this from happening.

"I began training Q in self-defense. I taught him to disable an attacker quickly and efficiently, since my assumption, based on Q's experience and the logic of his situation, was that in the great majority of cases, Q's assailants would intend to kill him or cause extreme harm." She glanced at LeBeau. "I fear I did not consider the basic irrationality of humans; as Q primarily works with Starfleet and scientists, people who I'd assumed would be able to control their irrational impulses, I did not train him to deal with an attacker who was compulsively acting out a ritual, as Dr. LeBeau was."

"Explain 'compulsively acting out a ritual.'"

"By that, I meant, in essence, a subconscious compulsion to enact a ritual which states, in essence, that Dr. LeBeau is a subordinate minor in need of protection from predatory males, in this case Q. This ritual originates from a time when all women were considered to be subordinate and lacking in adult competence, and were thought to need protection. When a man violated a woman's honor, by impugning her sexual value, it was acceptable for her to slap him, and he was expected not to retaliate because it would be beneath him to attack a mere female."

Dr. LeBeau had turned bright red. "That isn't what I meant by it at all! I--"

"You are not on trial, Dr. LeBeau," T'Laren assured her. "Q is. I merely explained the origins of the custom you enacted to illustrate my point, namely that I did not expect the people Q works with to engage in such illogical behavior. That is my failing."

Her demeanor was calm, cool, the perfect Vulcan. She showed no outward signs of the glee she felt at tearing LeBeau to shreds under the guise of being "logical". Any woman who would slap a man for calling her ugly when she'd just called him lousy in bed was, in T'Laren's mind, a primitive throwback and deserved what she got. There were definite advantages to being Vulcan sometimes. Now if Q would only keep his mouth shut and not try to pick up where T'Laren left off...

A miracle occurred, and he did keep his mouth shut. He looked at T'Laren with an expression that might have been astonishment, admiration or both, so apparently he had perceived what she had just done.

Okita's verdict, handed down after minimal deliberation, was simple. Q was not guilty of assault; it was an accident caused by an act of self-defense. Dr. LeBeau was required to take a class on sensitivity to other cultural mores in dealing with aliens, and Q was required to take a class on non-violent self-defense, both classes to be taken within the next six months. Slaps on the wrist all around, but Q didn't see it that way.

"_I_ have to take a class?" He had at least managed to keep his mouth shut until they left, so it was only T'Laren he was complaining to, as they walked down the hall back to their quarters. "Trying to do self-defense is what got me _into_ this mess."

"What got you into this mess was doing it poorly," T'Laren pointed out. "If you'd known what you were doing, you could have stopped her without hurting her."

"I doubt it."

"I think we should resume your lessons. Knowing a little bit about something is more dangerous than either complete ignorance or thorough knowledge."

"And how long will it take to acquire this mythical 'thorough knowledge'?" Q asked bitterly. "Three weeks under your oh-so-tender tutelage, and this was the result. How many weeks will it take before it's actually of use to me?"

"What happened the other night seems to indicate that it's of _use_ to you right now," T'Laren pointed out. "What went wrong was not with your technique, which was quite effective at disabling your attacker. You misjudged the threat that Dr. LeBeau represented. If she really _had_ been the threat you thought she was, you would have defended yourself effectively." She looked at him. "You know, now that I think about it, you need scenario training even more than self-defense training. I don't know why I didn't think of this before."

"Scenario training?"

"A form of training to understand social situations in an alien culture. I think we both know there is something wrong with the way I've been behaving toward you, and I think I've just realized what. I have simultaneously taken on a role as your teacher and your therapist. And you require both, desperately--"

"Thank you _so_ much. I'm far from _desperate_, T'Laren."

She shrugged slightly. The statement would stand on its own; she didn't need to argue the point with him. "The trouble is that the two roles are incompatible. As your teacher, I should point out to you when you are doing something wrong, and take an active role in showing you what you need to do. As your therapist, though, my role should be mostly passive, not attempting to direct your behavior, except in the sense that I should try to help _you_ see why your current behavior isn't getting you what you want. For instance, the night LeBeau attacked you, when I tried to demonstrate to you that you should not insult people when you're asking them for a favor... as your teacher, that was appropriate. But as your therapist, that was out of line. You should be able to believe you can say anything to me, and I won't retaliate."

"So you admit you were retaliating, then?" Q asked, a gleam in his eyes. T'Laren shook her head.

"No, but you believed I was. In that sense, your perception was more important than the reality. So what I'm thinking we should do, rather than have me try to correct your behavior as it occurs, is for us to take you through scenario training. You and I will go to one of the holodecks, and we'll run simulations of some standard social situations. I'll be there to explain when things go wrong and how to correct them. In a safe environment like the holodeck, where your mistakes will have no real social consequences, you may be able to learn without the kind of pressures that are on you in daily life."

"What is this fetish you have for holodecks? You won't be happy until you drag me into one, will you?"

"Why do you have such problems with them?" T'Laren countered.

"I don't see the point to trying to live in a fantasy world. What's the point to interacting with people that don't exist? All they can do is what you programmed them to do."

"Well, if you're using the holodeck for fantasy purposes, I always found it most interesting to interact with actual people. But then, I can tell whether a person in a holodeck is real or not. In this case, though, the whole idea is to learn how to interact with people that _do_ exist." She glanced over at him. He was probably being sullen because he thought she was telling him what to do. "It's actually a required course for non-humans at Starfleet Academy. I've taken it before. If you fear you might do something embarrassing, you have to realize I have seen a classful of young Vulcans who had never been off their homeworld take the scenarios. There's _nothing_ you could do as bad as what they did."

"You said you _took_ the class? Not taught it?"

"I was a cadet at the time; they'd hardly be having me teach a class." This was begging the question; she'd tutored it after she had sailed through all the scenarios on the first or second try.

Q looked at her. "But you were raised by humans. Why _ever_ would they force you to take such an absurdly unnecessary class?"

T'Laren hoped Q could not see the tips of her ears turning green with embarrassment. "I.. didn't try to get out of it. My math scores were too low that semester... I needed the grade."

A look of astonished amusement began to break over Q's face. "You mean, you deliberately allowed yourself to be assigned to a class that you _knew_ would be ridiculously easy for you?"

"I suppose... yes, you could say that."

"You cheated!" Q crowed delightedly.

"I did not cheat," T'Laren retorted, still embarrassed. A bit of the funny side began to show itself to her, and she allowed herself the sort of utterly deadpan expression she used when she was being humorous. "It would hardly have been ethical of me to try to get out of a Starfleet requirement that my fellows were bound to, simply because of my background."

"You cheated," Q repeated, still delighted. "My _dear_ T'Laren. I'm beginning to think there's some hope for you."

"Well, it wasn't quite as much as that. They tracked us based on species and likelihood of interacting with humans. My family come from the Shi'Kahr region, the most cosmopolitan area of Vulcan, and my mother _was_ a Starfleet officer, so they had me in the most challenging section." She turned to him. "They curve the grades, you see, based on the grades of the others in the class. So they did try to put everyone in a class based on estimated skill level."

"But they somehow overlooked the fact that you had spent your formative years on Earth."

"I'd put my natural parents' names down on my application to Starfleet, and the next of kin I listed were all Vulcan. They _did_ have the information on my entrance essay, but not on the abbreviated version of my records, so I suppose the professors didn't know."

"Did they find out?"

"Of course not. They were a bit stunned by my command of Terran idioms, but took a point or two off for inappropriate idioms when I used terms native to my home... we used some very colorful local expressions in Texas, and I actually had no idea that no one outside the area knew what they meant."

"This just gets better and better."

"Well, it was only fair," T'Laren said defensively. "I was tracked in with other Vulcans in my math and hard science courses, too. Vulcan superiority at math and physics isn't inborn-- it's something that comes as part of the disciplines. And well, you know how skilled I am at them..."

"Oh, of course," Q said solemnly. "Certainly, it was only fair." A grin broke out. "So did your classmates lynch you before or after the final exam?"

"My classmates were Vulcans," T'Laren retorted, "and Vulcans appreciate excellence. They did not 'lynch' me at all." She considered. "Though considering what I did to the curve, they probably would have refused to speak to me for the rest of the schoolyear if _they'd_ known I'd grown up on Earth."

Q laughed. "Such potential, at such a tender age. We may make a trickster out of you yet."

"It was never my ambition to be a trickster," T'Laren pointed out.

"Then why did you name your ship _Ketaya_?"

"A ketaya isn't merely a trickster; it's also a symbol for death and rebirth. And besides, the ship would eventually be a place for _you_ as well."

"Ah." Q nodded. "So. What other intriguing little bits of your past haven't you told me?"

"Most of them," T'Laren said blandly. Was this going to be another one of his attempts to manipulate her into telling him things she didn't want to talk about? She got enough of that from Tris. "So what do you think? Does the scenario training sound like a good idea?"

"Do I have a choice?"

"Certainly. We can go practice self-defense instead. You _are_ losing what ground you gained."

Q gave her a dirty look. "This is blackmail, you know."

* * *

He felt exceedingly stupid.

The holodeck scenario was a bar; he recognized it by the dimness and the fact that an inordinate number of patrons were sitting on stools in front of a counter instead of at the more civilized tables. Q had been feeling mostly good from his victory over LeBeau, though the notion that he had to take a class still rankled; and T'Laren's admission that she'd cheated at the Academy to improve her grade point average had delighted him. But now he was feeling tense again. This was a bar, and Q did not do well in bars.

T'Laren had assured him that the holodeck had safety interlocks. The patrons would not really beat him up. Nonetheless, he was nervous.

A woman approached him in an outrageously scanty costume, annoying Q considerably. His health had improved over the past few weeks, and in the past few days he had noted the return of one of the more unpleasant side effects of good health. The woman was aesthetically pleasing enough, although she wore too much makeup and her face had a bit of a frowzy look to it that the makeup was trying to conceal. She was, in addition to being even less real than the simulacrum-sentients he used to invent to populate his scenarios, not the sort of person who would have intrigued him in real life-- this was the kind of woman that hormonally overloaded men like Riker, for instance, spent time with. Once upon a time Q had found the antics of such women, and the men they hoodwinked, greatly amusing. Now he resented them furiously, since his body seemed to be unaware that he, as a superior being, should not be affected by a gratuitous display of flesh.

"Hello, stranger," the woman said in a sultry voice. "Buy a lady a drink?"

"If I saw a lady to buy a drink for, I _might_ contemplate it," Q retorted.

The woman hmmphed and flounced off. "Freeze program," T'Laren said.

Q turned to her. "What was that for?"

"Congratulations," T'Laren said dryly. "You've just made a new record. I didn't think it was possible to fail the scenario in the first line of dialogue."

"What are you talking about?"

"I told you that the object of the scenario is to get information about the location of Jason Jones. You need the prostitute's help for that. The Vulcan students all turned down the prostitute, too, but they were far less rude about it. You've just ensured that she will be unwilling to help you later in the scenario."

"How do you know?" Q challenged. "Maybe I can find another way around it. Or bribe her. She must be fairly venal if she sells her body for money."

"Very well. Why don't we try?"

An hour, several mortally insulted holograms, and a great deal of frustration later, Q came to the conclusion that T'Laren had been right the first time. You couldn't solve the scenario without the prostitute's help, and she was entirely unwilling to help him. Any of the characters who might have been persuaded to help him out in her place had also been offended by something he said, or did. "This is an incredibly stupid scenario. People are not nearly this quick to take offense."

"People who know you have undoubtedly developed thicker skins to compensate," T'Laren replied. "People who want something from you will try to make allowances. These people--"

"These _characters_, T'Laren. They're not self-aware."

"These characters, then, don't know you. You aren't the great Q, oracle of Starbase 56, to them; you're just some random human off the latest ship."

He stared at her. "You can't be serious. You mean people are actually treating me _better_ than they otherwise would?"

"Q, if it weren't for your value to the Federation, you would probably have died a long time ago. And not from an old enemy, either, but from a new one. Either that, or you would be stuck in a despicable dead-end job because you'd have offended the people who held your future in their hands."

That couldn't be true. People treated him terribly back on Starbase 56... "But people aren't offended by me here. And they haven't met me before."

"Your reputation precedes you. And you _are_ valuable to the Federation. People of value are expected to be more arrogant than people who are not."

Q scowled. He was not going to be beaten by a stupid computer program. "Computer, restart program."

The bar reappeared, and the prostitute sauntered up to him. "Hello, stranger. Buy a lady a drink?"

"Not tonight, thanks. I have a headache."

Apparently she accepted that absurd reply as inoffensive, smiling at him. "Well, if you change your mind, come on over to the bar and ask for Cilla. All right, honey?" She didn't wait for an answer to that, which was good, as Q was deeply offended at being called "honey", even by a computer program. He glared at T'Laren, who was wearing the sort of perfectly deadpan expression that meant she was probably snickering hysterically inside.

An hour and a half later, Q had managed to get further through the scenario before reaching a dead end, but hadn't managed to complete it. "This is _unbelievably_ stupid. How can these people be so obstinate? How can _anyone_ solve this?"

"People do," T'Laren said. "Though it took one young man of my acquaintance seventeen tries. The trouble is that you are assuming these people _must_ help you, that they are obligated to. They are not. You're asking them for favors and offering nothing in return--"

"I _tried_ bribery."

"Rather clumsily, though. Simply saying, 'Will you tell me if I give you money?' is embarrassingly blunt to most people, who would prefer to believe that they are doing you a favor and you're doing one in return, not that this is a crass commercial transaction. These are humans, remember. Not Ferengi."

"I didn't know humans still _were_ prostitutes anymore."

"In certain areas of Earth, yes. When they choose to be."

The notion that he could be beaten by a test someone else set for him, a test a bunch of Vulcans with no experience at _all_ of human beings, let alone the millennia he spent studying them, were able to pass, galled him. Q's eyes narrowed. "Reset program."

He tried three times more, getting closer each time, but more and more frustrated. Finally, in total frustration, he decided to go ahead and buy the prostitute a drink. Maybe he'd be able to get information from her if he plied her with synthehol first.

As he sat down with her at the bar, he leaned forward. "Tell me what you know about Jason Jones," he said. He was beginning to hate that name. Why couldn't they have named the plot macguffin something interesting, like Isaiah Takamura or something?

"What do you want to know about _him_ for, sugar?" the woman crooned. "I'm right here."

She put her hand on his leg.

Q knew a moment of instant and total panic. She was going to do something to him. Like Amy Frasier had, and his body would betray him, would cooperate with her in usurping his will. People rarely touched him-- before T'Laren, no one ever had, except to administer a hypo or drag him off to house arrest-- and _no_ one but Amy Frasier had ever touched him there. It should have been innocuous-- it was on the side of his leg, not the inner surface, halfway between the knee and the groin. But his body didn't seem to think it was innocuous, and neither did he. A jolt of something went through him, like an electric shock where she touched him, and for a terrified moment he simply couldn't move at all. Then he jerked backward with such force that he fell off the chair.

"Computer, cushion!" T'Laren shouted.

He fell into some thick, soft surface. The prostitute character was leaning over him with a false expression of concern. "What's wrong, honey? You all right?"

"Don't touch me!" Q gasped hoarsely, the panic consuming him. One touch. One touch was all it had been, and now his body was burning, aching in a way he found more humiliating than almost any other discomfort. She might touch him again, and his body might take over his will, as it had with Amy when he hadn't been able to push her away, had barely been able to choke out a refusal. And this time his body might not let him refuse.

"Computer, end program!" T'Laren said.

And suddenly he was sitting on the floor, not a soft cushion at all, shaking almost uncontrollably. "What happened?" T'Laren asked, running over to him-- she had been standing in the back of the room, watching without interfering, until this.

It would sound so stupid, such a juvenile, ridiculous fear, that Q didn't want to tell her. But he did. Talking to T'Laren was a habit, and he wanted... something, he wasn't sure what. Maybe reassurance, or validation, or a logical explanation of his fears, so he could have something to justify them to himself with. "She... touched me," he managed to say, suffering from dire humiliation, still trembling, barely able to say it.

"On the leg, you mean?"

Q nodded.

"I'm so sorry." T'Laren knelt next to him. "I had no idea it was this bad for you; I should never have given you this scenario."

"No, you shouldn't have," Q agreed, glad she was giving him a target to blame besides himself. This was ridiculous. He was still shaking, and over what? He had been beaten near to death, had suffered assassination attempts too horrid to remember, and here he was, shaking because a hologram had touched him on the leg. What had he been afraid of? She was a _hologram_, as much under his power as all mortals had once been, almost as much as the simulacra he himself had created had been. He could have just deleted her if he didn't like what she was doing, as he might have disintegrated a simulacrum or banished a mortal to oblivion.

But he had been afraid because... he had wanted it. Every fiber of his treacherous body had yearned toward that simple touch, had wanted the hologram to keep going, had wanted to beg for more. All it took was such a little thing, and he was reduced to the needs of his body, his higher faculties and the disgust he felt falling by the wayside. She was a nonsentient _thing_, for the sake of all, and he had wanted her to touch him, to... to do things that had absolutely nothing to do with the higher faculties of intellect or even of emotion, except the most base brute need.

"I want to go home," he said, and cringed at how plaintive his voice sounded.

"Of course. We'll go back right now." She offered her hand to help him up, but Q didn't take it. He hadn't sunk _that_ low. And besides, he feared what might happen if she touched him now, in the state he was in. He certainly didn't want to think of T'Laren _that_ way. There would be no escape; he couldn't avoid her.

Back in the room, T'Laren asked him, "Do you want to talk about it?"

"No," Q said flatly. Talking about it was the _last_ thing he wanted to do. Of course, it was going to take a miracle to make T'Laren see that; she never left him alone on things like this. "I'm going to bed."

"All right," she said. "But remember. If you do decide you want to talk about it, you can always talk to me."

Q looked at her, startled. She almost looked sincere. Where was the cajoling, the wheedling information out of him?

He wasn't going to question it. Before she could change her mind and start trying to worm it out of him, he ducked into the room. He was only overtired, that was all. It had been a strenuous day, and even though it was relatively early for him, he wasn't fully recovered. That was all it was. Surely he wouldn't have responded like that to a _hologram_ if he hadn't been exhausted.

* * *

He awakened that night from the midst of an intense dream, heart pounding, his body sheened with sweat... and certain other, uncomfortable, physical symptoms.

Q cursed, and sat up angrily. The memory of the dream lingered, affecting him far more than he liked, disturbing him deeply. It wasn't enough that he had to have horrible dreams, but that he had to dream about _that?_

This was the worst kind. Q had become inured to nightmares long ago. He would wake up, heart pounding, call for lights and reassure himself that it had only been a dream-- change pajamas if they were too sweaty, take a shower if required, listen to music or work or do something to get his mind off the dream. They weren't real, and when he managed to assure himself of that, he could recover from the fear they engendered. He'd had to learn to-- even with the sedatives he took, Q woke with nightmares more often than not.

The Continuum dreams were worse, but usually only when they occurred just before he had to get up. Incidents like what happened the first night aboard _Ketaya_ were rare; most of the time, if Q woke up from a Continuum dream, he tried his best to get back to sleep and recapture it. When he was awake, he found it somewhat shameful that he would so blatantly try to cling to a comforting fantasy instead of waking up and facing reality; Q enjoyed fantasy as much as the next person, or had when he'd had his powers, at least, but only truly pathetic weaklings fled from the lives they were leading into flights of fantasy. When he did it, though, he was usually too close to sleep to be able to control himself.

No, by far the worst ones were the erotic dreams. With the nightmares, the physical effects he suffered were the aftereffects of fear, and easily dealt with. The effects that erotic dreams engendered in him could only be dealt with by engaging in an utterly repulsive activity that Q had absolutely no wish to perform, and that nauseated him and made him feel pathetic and debased when need drove him to. And _this_ particular one... Q might have expected that he'd have dreamed about the hologram, or something. It made sense that his mind would do that to him, to take such a senseless image and brutalize him with it. But that wasn't what happened.

Sometimes the dreams were absurd enough that he could keep from taking them too seriously. He hadn't actually believed the one about Medellin when he was in it, and the only lingering aftereffects _that_ one had left him with was disgust. Sometimes they latched onto imaginary people, or people who meant less than nothing to him-- the hologram, for instance, or the woman who served snacks one day at one of his conferences on Starbase 56. Those left him with a good portion of self-disgust for the utter meaninglessness of the desire, but at least they didn't present him with any actual possibilities. Some of the dreams were frighteningly intense, but dealt with people beyond his reach-- like Picard, for instance, who would never have wanted to do such a thing with Q, even if Q had wanted to, or Data, who probably understood the mechanics even less well than Q did, or Keth'wyn, Tandoris' defiant sister from the time Q had been Tajitan, Keth'wyn who had defied him and intrigued him and who was over a thousand years dead.

Dreaming about T'Laren, though... that was horrible. She was right there, separated from him by a thin wall. He knew he didn't talk in his sleep, because he'd been paranoid enough to record himself a few nights, but he did make sounds-- whimpers of fear, moans of... other emotions. It was an obscenity beyond belief that he could have been dreaming _that_, about _her_, when she might even have heard him moaning, she was so close. And that wasn't the worst of it either. Q huddled , wrapping his arms around himself, trying to drive out the memory, but it was impossible.

He had dreamed that she'd raped him. There was no other word for it. And he'd liked it. She had pinned him down and forced him, doing things to him that he should have protested, should have fought off. In the dream, he had known this was wrong, had known he shouldn't want this. But he hadn't resisted. And-- and when he felt himself waking up, he had tried to cling to sleep, to perpetuate the obscenity that was happening to him.

How could he have _done_ that? How could he have wanted it? Was there some dark part of his psyche that wanted to be raped, the way male human morons had claimed human women felt for centuries before finally getting a clue about two hundred years ago? And why had his subconscious chosen T'Laren to do it? He knew the real life T'Laren would never do such a thing; he wouldn't go near her if he thought she would. He also knew that the real T'Laren thought he was physically repulsive and was turned off by his personality, though she was willing to accept him as a friend. Even if her ethics didn't get in the way, she couldn't want him. And that was exactly what he wanted; if he ever _did_ engage in such base animal behaviors, it would be with someone who thought highly of him, not someone who had seen him broken and crying and suicidal. Besides, he was angered that his body's unnecessary hormonal reactions might interfere with his ability to appreciate T'Laren aesthetically; he didn't _want_ to get those sort of feelings every time he looked at her if he was going to be spending a lot of time in her company. So why had his mind presented him with such images, and _why_ had his mind concocted a fantasy in which T'Laren forced him? If the dream had had overtones of horror and fear, he might have borrowed a page from T'Laren's own dream interpretation book and decided it was representing his fear of her telepathic powers, or something. But there hadn't been anything like that-- just guilt, sick excitement, and pleasure.

Angrily he got up and got dressed. Sleep was a lost cause right now, unless he was willing to do something truly disgusting, which he wasn't. He stalked out of the room-- thank whatever fates there were that T'Laren was not in the common room-- and out into the hall, where the slightly dimmed lights and scarcity of people proclaimed how late it was. He didn't care. He'd blow off the conference again tomorrow if he had to, but he wasn't going back to the emptiness of his room, not now. It would be courting disaster.

At this hour, he only passed one or two people in the halls. And that was good-- the last thing he wanted was to deal with people. At the same time, though, the emptiness disturbed him. It was too quiet, too lonely, too much like his bedroom. If he'd wanted to stay someplace quiet and unpopulated, he would have stayed there.

He found himself at the doors to Ten-Forward, as if he'd been pulled there by some unconscious tropism. It was not where he wanted to be, he was sure, but when he thought about it he realized there _was_ nowhere he wanted to be right now, nowhere in his reach, anyway. So he stepped inside.

On Starbase 56, there'd been a big difference between a lounge and a bar. There were places for the base inhabitants, provided by Starfleet, low-key places like this, and then there were privately owned places for the transients, places that were grungy and served real alcohol. Q had found the bar the more entertaining of the two locales until the Bajoran women beat him up in it; after that, he stuck to the lounges. Ten-Forward, like Guinan's Ten-Forward, was definitely a lounge.

There had been many, many nights when insomnia and vague needs Q couldn't explain had driven him to the lounge, to sit nursing a cup of coffee, or several, for hours and stare out the large portholes at the stars. Here there were no portholes, but one entire wall was transparent. Q sat down by it with a coffee, staring sullenly into the darkness beyond the transparasteel.

Human beings had a deep and abiding need for symbols to represent that which they could not see. Q had found that tendency quaintly amusing once, and been totally unprepared for the strength of the need when he himself became human. The ineffable nature of the home he'd left behind was barely comprehensible to him anymore, its "location" a silly question when posed by a human mind, even one that had once lived there. He needed a symbol to represent his home, and his mind had latched onto space, the stars, the inhospitable region in which he now traveled. In morose moods like this, he would stare out at the tiny spots of light and see his home in them-- magical, beautiful, forevermore out of his reach. Once he could have reached out his hand and grasped those stars, just as easily as he moved through dimensional planes between the Continuum and this matter-based universe. All gone now.

He buried himself in the scent of the coffee, fighting off tears. The loneliness, the sense of loss was overwhelming him. And he couldn't turn to T'Laren, couldn't look at her right now, couldn't even think of her without his mind turning to that horrid dream, and his body reacting to the memory. But without her to turn to, he was no better off than he'd been on Starbase 56.

Once, very long ago, when he'd been young and stupid, Q had experimented with cutting himself off from the Continuum. They were annoying him, demanding that he do this and that and the other thing that he didn't really want to do. And so he had--only for a moment-- severed the link.

What he'd felt then-- aside from the terror-- related to no one human sensation directly. The terror, of course, was very much like human terror, or at least he remembered it that way. But the _reason_ he felt terror, the sensations he'd experienced, didn't translate exactly. It was like cold, and hunger, and the weakness he got if he got angry or overexcited when he had gone without food too long. It was like loneliness, but like a loneliness that could literally kill, a loneliness as dangerous and powerful as starvation and hypothermia.

He had tried to connect back, to re-establish the link, but he didn't know how. Without the power from the Continuum filling him, warming him, he was lost, disoriented and cold, unable to perceive how to reach back to them. Panicked, he had thrown all the power he had left into a desperate cry for help. A few nanoseconds later, one of his older siblings had swooped down on him and drawn him back into the Continuum, enfolding him, bathing him with warmth and light and telling him how many different kinds of idiot he was. It was one of the last transitional events of his childhood-- the brief instant of terror and pain had burned a lesson into him, jolted him a step further into maturity whether he liked it or not.

Q felt like that now. He was cold on the outside, burning up on the inside, his skin chilled and desperately hungry, starving for something. The loneliness he felt was something he was more inured to than he'd been ten thousand years ago, but no less terrible. And no one was going to swoop down on him, gather him up and comfort him now. He wanted-- he wasn't sure what he wanted, since sex was disgusting and sordid and the cold hungry loneliness he felt would not be sated by touching himself, as mere sexual arousal would be. Sexual arousal was a part of it, a different kind of hungry ache, a heat at his core and between his legs to contrast against the cold hunger for warmth he felt everywhere else-- but it wasn't all there was. And that was confusing-- he didn't know whether to fight it or not, didn't know what he _was_ fighting. If someone offered him what he wanted, would he even know that that was it?

But it hardly mattered what he wanted, after all. Since he wasn't going to get it, now was he?

"Do you mind if I join you?" a voice behind him asked.

Q didn't turn to look at the interloper. "Yes."

He heard a chair being pulled back, felt someone sitting down at the table, and turned his head angrily. "Do you have a hearing problem?"

"Most likely," Elejani Baíi said.

"I don't want to talk to you."

"I may not be your ideal choice, but I'm better than no one."

"Hardly. Now go away."

"You prefer staring out the window into space and contemplating suicide?"

"Yes. Go away."

"I would go away if that was what you really wanted," Elejani Baíi said. "But since you're only saying that so you don't have to admit that what you want is to talk to someone, I think you would really prefer it if I stayed."

Q stared at her, outraged. Humiliation swept over him as he remembered that Elejani Baíi was an empath. "Get out of my head," he told her icily.

"I'm not in your head. You're shouting, and I can't help it that I'm not deaf."

"Don't you have mental shields or something?"

"Yes, of course. They work wonderfully to stop other empaths from sensing my emotions. But they're not very good at keeping other people's voices out." She shrugged. "I tried not to listen, but your mental voice is very loud."

"Why would that be? I have no psionic abilities."

"Psionic abilities only give you the ability to consciously modulate what you're broadcasting. The rest of it is force of personality." She smiled.

Well. Reluctantly he admitted that that made sense-- in the Continuum, force of personality and loudness of mental "voice" _were_ closely related. And he undoubtedly had a more powerful personality than most of these bland little creatures. "I'm tremendously sorry if my depression inconveniences you, then," he said in his most sarcastic voice.

"I owe you far too much to feel that you are inconveniencing me," she said simply.

"Is this more of that 'I saved your silly little planet' nonsense?" Q asked harshly. "That wasn't me. I let you think so because it amused me, but it isn't amusing anymore."

"Who was it then?"

He didn't think she believed him. Had he slipped that far? Certainly he could still tell a convincing lie, couldn't he? "My people are closely interrelated mentally, far more than you can imagine. It _was_ a Q-- it just wasn't _me_. Of course, your empathy is a sufficiently primitive sense that you'd be unable to detect the distinction there."

"Do you remember your first meeting with Captain Picard?"

"What does Picard have to do with this?"

Elejani Baíi smiled. "The emotional resonance you present when you think of your first meeting with Picard is very similar to what you presented when I described the deeds of Emaroth. Either you _were_ Emaroth, then, or you identify with the being who was so closely that you may as well be her. One way or the other, then, I owe you."

"I didn't do it for you," Q retorted nastily. "I did it because I was bored and you people were boring, and boring creatures should not be allowed to exist. I decided I was going to make you look up from your shallow, complacent little lives and start being of interest to someone whether you liked it or not. I had no grand benevolent motives, and I am _not_ interested in being worshipped."

"Oh, I know," Elejani Baíi assured him. "I worshipped you when I was a child, but I don't see you as a god right now... or a demon or anything of the sort. I'm well aware that you're a person who happened to belong to a far more advanced species, but still a person. But regardless of whether you had grand benevolent motives or not, you were very important to my life-- I don't even mean the fact that you saved my people from a supernova and that therefore I wouldn't exist without you; that's important, of course, but not my greatest consideration."

Q was somewhat bewildered. "I don't recall having done anything else of great note in your planet's history."

"My people are extremely boring," Elejani Baíi said. "You are completely correct. When I was a child, there was no outlet for the dreamers, for people who wished to explore and question. They told us space was your domain, and if we encroached on it you would carry us off to hell. I felt sure that hell would be better than my life then, so I researched you, and the events of three thousand years ago, and I felt sure you weren't the monster they claimed you were. Space was full of suns just like our own. When we fled Old Laon, we encountered other species in our travels, who lived on worlds that orbited those suns, worlds like the one we came to. What then was hellish about space? And you, when I read between the lines of the records, had placed a premium on individual thought and then carried the thinkers off with you. I couldn't believe that thought was evil or dangerous. So I decided you were more like an angel, come to guide us to the next step of our evolution, and that you'd taken those who passed your tests to a far more interesting place. I used to pray to you to come take me." She smiled.

In some ways, Elejani Baíi was clearly demonstrating how much she was like other mortals, how little clue she'd had as to what had really gone on. In other respects, she seemed frighteningly close to the truth. In all his human existence, Q had never met anyone who'd thought of him as a benevolent god, and it made him obscurely fearful. "You must have been terribly disappointed when I didn't," he drawled coolly.

"But you _did_\-- indirectly. The Scamarans came back to us, and brought the Federation and the stars. At the time I thought you'd planned that."

"Nothing of the sort," he protested, about to come up with something scathing. She interrupted.

"I know that now," she said patiently. "I thought you were a god then, that you were watching us still. I know better now. But it was still your doing, don't you see? If I had grown up on Old Laon, before your coming, what would I have had even to dream about, or to wish for? You kept me alive in a world so numbingly empty it would have crushed my soul. It was not your plan to do so, perhaps, and certainly it was not for my benefit in particular, but that makes my gratitude to you no less."

"This is terribly sweet, but what makes you think I want to hear your life story?" Q asked sarcastically.

"Too late, I'm done," Elejani Baíi said brightly. "And it isn't that I thought you wanted to hear my life story, it's that I wanted you to know that of all the people in the galaxy who seem to hate you for what you were, one person at least feels gratitude to you." She leaned forward slightly, placing her hands flat on the table, very slightly over the midline into his half. "You have someone to turn to should you... need anything."

"You don't have anything I need," Q retorted.

"Perhaps not. I merely make the offer." She looked directly into his eyes. "It may well be that if you think about it, you will find there are things you need, or even that would merely make you more comfortable, that I _can_ help you with. And it would make me very happy to do so."

Was he imagining things? As keyed up as he was from the dream, he could easily be mistaken, could be reading her wrong-- she _couldn't_ mean what he thought she meant. Could she?

"I'm not interested in charity," he said harshly.

"Neither am I. But I'm an empath. And a Laon'l," Elejani Baíi said in an amused tone of voice. "Perhaps you don't remember quite _how_ dull our lives are. I've discovered, since leaving my homeworld, that there's a host of things that humans and most other species can experience, but that I can only feel if someone else experiences them, someone I am... close to. Naturally, I would like to show my gratitude toward someone I owe so much... but it would not be mere gratitude. I cannot help but feel what those I'm close to feel... when I do favors for people, I get out exactly as much as I put in. Do you see what I'm saying?"

He was very much afraid that he did. Q's mouth was dry, his heart pounding. Harry Roth flirted with him, but Q didn't take that seriously-- it was a game to Harry, at least when he wasn't drunk, and it was certainly no more than a game to Q. This was different. If he were reading Elejani Baíi correctly, this was the first real verbal proposition he had ever received, and it terrified him. His eyes were glued to the petite form of the woman before him, the fluffy, short white hair and soft features, the huge golden eyes and delicate, exposed shoulders, mouth curved in an understated but almost certainly inviting smile. Was she mocking him? He couldn't tell. He couldn't trust himself, and she knew everything he was feeling, could drag it out and humiliate him with it at any moment.

"I'm afraid not," he said, trying to be cold, although it was hard to do it right when his mouth was so dry. He pushed back his chair. "Perhaps if I had the vaguest idea what you were talking about, your offer might intrigue me, but I confess I'm too bored with this conversation to puzzle it out."

She slid out of her chair and stood. "Perhaps it will come to you at a later date," she suggested. "If so, my offer will still be open. If you need anything... anything at all... I would be delighted to help you."

It was a common enough cliché, but the way she said it, it sounded as if she meant it. But she couldn't possibly. And even if she did, he couldn't risk it. Q stood there and gazed at her with a forbidding stony mask on his face, dismally aware that she knew about the conflict under that mask perfectly well, and feeling like he had when he was a child and hadn't mastered shielding himself and his older siblings were constantly invading his head and making rude comments about what they found there. Elejani Baíi made no rude comments, though. She simply bowed slightly to him and left.

As soon as she was gone, Q sat back down and put his head in his hands, trying not to moan. She _had_ meant it, he was sure of it. His body was screaming at him that he was seven different kinds of fool for letting her go, that he should call her back, go to her room-- she'd just _told_ him she wanted to. And so many people had tortured him and tried to kill him for who he used to be-- would it be so terribly wrong to accept gratitude from the one person in the universe who felt it for him?

Yes. It would be wrong, and even if it wasn't wrong, it would be abysmally stupid. Elejani Baíi didn't know him, knew nothing about him except that once he had harried and herded and helped her people. She knew him as Daishenéon Emaroth in an alien body, the goddess/demon she had believed in as a child-- not Q, the human. His humanity, his fallibility would disgust her, if she expected a god. People didn't react well when they learned their idols were mere clay. There was no way he could ever show his vulnerability to someone who looked up to him, someone who thought highly of him, who had never seen him broken and crying and suicidal. The disappointment would be too great for her, and she would turn it against him, and destroy him for not being a god.

No, he'd done the right thing in telling her to leave. So why did he regret it so much?

He saw no choice but to return to his room-- there was nothing for him out here, and he didn't want to be subjected to an endless parade of people asking him what was wrong. It was unlikely he'd be able to sleep, but maybe if he read, or listened to music, or something, he could drag his mind away from its current painful obsessions.

As the door slid open, he heard heavy breathing. Horrified, he stepped inside. A scantily clad T'Laren, body sheened with sweat, was in the common room, exercising.

She was doing this on purpose. She had to be. The timing was far too diabolical otherwise. "_What_ do you think you're doing?" he snapped.

"Exercising. Why?"

"I would _appreciate_ it if you would refrain from such a disgusting display in my presence," he told her, his voice as cold and vicious as he could make it.

"I wasn't in your presence when I started," she replied mildly.

"You were in my room, were you not? What compels you to strip away all vestiges of civilization and sentience and comport yourself like an animal, grunting and sweating as if you had no higher brain functions at all? What do you think you are, a Klingon?"

"Did you know that you actually sound hysterical?" T'Laren asked. "I don't think I've ever heard you sounding this shrill."

"I am _not_ _shrill_!!" Q forced his voice back down to its normal register. "What do you expect? I come back to my room after a bout with insomnia, only to be confronted with this hideous display. Did you truly think I _wanted_ to see you in such repulsive condition?"

"I truly didn't care what you thought one way or the other, as I assumed you were in your room asleep."

"Then did it ever occur to you that these animalistic behaviors of yours might actually wake me up?"

"Since I've done this nearly every night since we came to _Yamato_, and you haven't complained yet, the evidence suggested not."

"Well, put an end to it. _Now._" He couldn't look at her. Her body was all power and grace, long and exquisitely honed, the sort of beauty that came from a perfect marriage of form and function. He had never considered the notion that physical power might have any aesthetic component to it. Or that his body would respond so strongly to that aesthetic component, betraying him cruelly.

"You realize that you're being totally unreasonable, of course."

"_I'm_ being unreasonable? You're the one parading around half-naked in _my room_!"

T'Laren picked up a robe from where she'd apparently tossed it on the couch and shrugged it on. "Does this protect your delicate sensibilities?" she asked dryly.

She hadn't shut the robe properly. The top of the square-cut halter showed clearly, and the lines under the halter that demarcated the swell of her breasts. The bottom of the robe parted to display the bottom of her shorts and entirely too much leg. Q swallowed and turned away. "Barbarian. I don't know why I expect civilized behavior out of you."

He stomped off to his room, entirely too late. The image of T'Laren in her halter and shorts was burnt into his brain, along with a horrid recurring image looping as if he were a poorly programmed computer, of the halter and shorts spontaneously disintegrating, and what lay beneath-- no. No, that was utterly disgusting. Q flung himself on the bed, trying to shut down his mind. He wouldn't think about that. He wouldn't. Even if T'Laren did go about wearing ridiculously skimpy clothes, he had no right to undress her in his head, and besides which, he didn't want to. It was wrong, and disgusting, and beneath his dignity...

...and he couldn't stop.

Q bit back a moan, realizing he'd been defeated, when he found himself pressing against the bed in a disgustingly familiar pattern. There was no way he was going to get to sleep. Too many things had conspired against him to make him need, to awaken this body's instincts in ways he much preferred to remain dormant. There was nothing left he could do.

Since he was the primary occupant of the suite, he had a door directly into the suite's bathroom. The fact that it opened as he approached indicated there was no one else inside; once he entered, the computer would automatically lock both sides, and require a voice command from him or his departure to unlock the doors again. T'Laren couldn't walk in on him here, and she couldn't hear him either. Not after he turned on the sonic shower, anyway.

Back on Starbase 56, Security had had a habit of barging into Q's bedroom. Sometimes they did it to annoy or frighten him, but most often it was because of a legitimate false alarm (or for that matter a legitimate real alarm)-- the computer, programmed to respond to Q's cries for help, had sometimes sent distress signals to Security when he was in the middle of a nightmare, or when he'd just stubbed his toe. He had never truly felt he had privacy there. However, even Security wouldn't barge into the bathroom without trying to contact him and ask if he was all right. Which was just as well, as the bathroom was also the only sanitary place for disposing of bodily wastes, and that was exactly what he perceived himself to be doing. Nothing but a form of urination that was entirely optional and avoidable, or should have been, anyway.

He leaned against the shower wall, feeling the sound waves bathe him and strip away the sweat and filth that covered his body. There was no way T'Laren would hear anything-- the sonic frequency Q had set the shower to was one that was quite audible to Vulcans. He'd checked. So even if she could hear through the bathroom door, all she'd be able to hear was the shower. He was safe.

Even so, he fought to keep from moaning as his hand moved of its own volition, soothing swollen flesh. This shouldn't feel good. It was a human weakness that it did, just as it was a human weakness that eating and sleeping felt good, his body trying to break him to the level of the mere human it was through pleasure/pain conditioning. Q was not Pavlov's dog, though, and refused the conditioning. This didn't feel good, he didn't want to be doing this, and he most _especially_ didn't wish it was T'Laren doing it instead...

...but his body would not brook such defiance. It invaded his mind with images, surfacing out of the dark haze of pleasure and guilt swirling through his mind... images of T'Laren. He saw her naked, saw her kissing him, stroking his back and his chest, touching him in the way he was doing to himself now. Q couldn't get rid of the images, couldn't even properly fight them. And even though what he was doing should satisfy him, had always gotten rid of the need in the past, tonight there was an entirely different component to the longing. It wasn't enough that he wanted this. No, he wanted someone specific to be doing it, someone who he had shouted at less than ten minutes ago and who was merely on the other side of a door from him, and he couldn't have her any more than he could have anyone. But he had never wanted a specific person this badly before, certainly never someone so close within reach. The sensations coursing through him were like a refined torture, because they couldn't give him what he really wanted, couldn't truly satisfy him.

With a half-sob, Q gave into the fantasy, letting his human brain construct whatever scenarios it wished in whatever degree of vividness it chose without even trying to fight it anymore. Tears ran from tightly closed eyes as his free hand roamed his body, feeding the fantasy with touches and caresses that he imagined came from her. He imagined her pressing into him, hot, dry skin against his cooler, sweat-soaked flesh, warming him; imagined her lips pressing against his, like the way some giddy and probably drunk young woman had kissed him after they'd defeated the Borg and he'd never seen her again or learned her name or cared. T'Laren's hand was between his legs, stroking him, and her other hand was playing with his nipple, and he moaned as the need broke and release swept over him, entirely in the grip of the impossible fantasy.

And then reality sank back in, all the crueler for his brief attempt to deny it. T'Laren was not here. He was standing naked in the shower, having just debauched himself nauseatingly, and worse, allowed himself to fantasize about debauching someone else. What a pathetic, miserable, disgusting little lump of flesh he was. What had ever possessed him to think he still retained any of the higher qualities he'd had as a Q? He was far, far worse than the humans. At least they betrayed no higher aspirations when they fulfilled their biological imperatives. It was, after all, the job of a mortal to reproduce itself. One couldn't blame them for that. But one could blame _him_ for engaging in such a useless and disgusting activity. He couldn't reproduce himself if he wanted to. He couldn't form intimate connections with other mortals, either, the other thing they used sex for. All he could do was make a pitiful fool of himself pretending he'd formed a connection with someone, when that someone demonstrably had no such interest in him.

A sob forced its way out of his throat. Q fell to his knees in the shower, eyes closed, reaching out to steady himself against the wall as more sobs welled up in him. He was so lonely. It had been three years since he'd known the companionship of his own kind, and even if he wanted to reach out to his fellow mortals, he didn't know how, or what good it would do him. He was entirely too pathetic to have friends. He was unattractive and unappealing, and he knew it, and yet he indulged in disgusting fantasies about mortals wanting him. How ridiculous could you get? If anyone knew how low he'd sunk, they would laugh their heads off.

And look at him now. This was a new low of pitifulness, crying in the shower because he wanted to have sex with someone and they could never possibly want him. Black despair rolled over Q in a dark wave, drowning him. No matter what he did, what he tried to do or not to do, he just kept sinking lower and lower. Why couldn't he accept the unavoidable? Why couldn't he perceive his human life as the time-marking it was, and concentrate on getting through it and getting the Continuum to give him his powers back, instead of making a fool of himself wanting things he couldn't possibly have and hated himself for wanting in the first place? He wrapped his arms around his knees and sobbed, rocking back and forth in an unconscious attempt to soothe himself, but his pain would not be soothed. He was a miserable pathetic little person and he hated himself.

_Was this what you wanted to show me? Was this the big lesson I was supposed to learn? That, if you strip away my connection to the Continuum and my powers and my immortality, I'm even more pathetic and disgusting than a human being? You wanted to show me how unfit I always really was to be a Q, was that it?_

A renewed wave of sobbing hit him, as he followed the despair out to its logical conclusion. _Which means... you'll never take me back, will you? If I was always unworthy, you couldn't possibly pollute the species by letting me come back. You're going to leave me here to rot, to suffer in boredom and loneliness and the knowledge you've given me of my own unworthiness, and I'm never ever going to be one of you again..._

This sort of serious overreaction was not like Q. Or rather, it was not like Q when he wasn't suffering from something that he wouldn't readily admit to. T'Laren puzzled over his behavior as she got dressed, her exercise session shot to hell.

Q had sounded almost panicked. His voice had been shrill and hysterical as he insulted her for daring to exercise in his presence. T'Laren didn't believe for a moment that he was as disgusted as he'd claimed; if he hadn't stalked off and taken a shower before she could respond, she would have pointed out to him that he hadn't shown any sign of such disgust when he'd walked in on her exercising in Vulcan gravity on _Ketaya_, or when they exercised together for that matter. She fully intended to point this out to him when he got out of the shower; apparently she had made a mistake when she'd let him simply go to bed without talking about whatever had bothered him on the holodeck. Whatever it was, it could well be related to whatever pain he'd suffered that had driven him out of his bed and out of his room in the middle of the night, and subsequently led him to scream at her for exercising.

She walked back out into the common room, listening for the shower. It was an annoying grinding noise at the low range of her hearing, with less unpleasant overtones in the higher ranges. All a human could hear were the higher ranges, which made sonic showers popular among humans. On Vulcan, the sonic freshers were much quieter, or operated in a much lower sound range, depending on how you wanted to look at it. But even here, the sonic showers could be set to be practically inaudible to Vulcans; T'Laren always used water when she could get it, water symbolizing luxury to a girl who'd grown up in dry Texas and then on Vulcan, but she knew that the showers _could_ be set to levels she was comfortable with. Was Q deliberately being rude, or did he simply not know she could hear it?

When the sound stopped, she'd wait a decorous ten minutes or so for him to get dressed and go back to his bedroom, and then she'd confront him. In the meantime, she should figure out a line of attack. In what way might the holodeck incident have triggered this outburst?

Well, the holodeck incident had shown that Q had a far deeper fear of sex than she'd thought previously. When he'd explained what Amy Frasier did to him, T'Laren might not have placed quite enough weight on the incident. She'd known that he'd thought of it as being molested, even though it was clear to T'Laren that he had, at best, sent confused signals, and at worst led Frasier on. The fact that _she_ could see clearly that it hadn't been an attempted rape, and that she'd explained her perceptions to Q, might have led her to undervalue _his_ perception that it was. Nothing could explain his overreaction to being touched by the prostitute hologram but a fear of being sexually molested.

And then he'd panicked when he'd seen her dressed for exercise... T'Laren put her hand to her head and allowed herself a sigh. He hadn't gotten it into his head that _she_ meant to molest him, had he? She'd _told_ Q she wasn't attracted to him, with the blunt honesty he seemed to respond best to, and at the time she'd thought he believed her. Had she done anything to give him cause for concern since?

She didn't think she had. In fact, she and Q hadn't gotten along awfully well since they'd come about _Yamato_, and that was her fault, her distraction. She'd let him get to her with his nasty digs about Sovaz and his insinuations about Tris-- and dammit, if he was afraid of her sexuality why did he keep bringing up her relationship with Tris and her betrayal of Soram? She knew Q targeted any weaknesses he found, but it seemed a curious weakness to harp on if he was afraid she would molest him. Or had this fear come up just recently? Did he think she had set him up to be molested by putting him in that scenario?

That sounded painfully likely. T'Laren leaned up against the bathroom door, closing her eyes in anger at herself. She should have checked more carefully. She should have remembered what the prostitute did if you bought her a drink-- she'd tutored enough Vulcan students of both sexes through it, she'd seen the prostitute's antics often enough. The fact that it had been twenty years ago was no excuse. She shouldn't have exposed Q to a holodeck scenario she didn't fully understand.

...was that _crying_ she heard in there?

She turned her head, laying one ear directly against the door, after brushing a few errant curls out of the way. The sound of the shower grew louder, of course. She focused on the filtering discipline, concentrating on blocking the annoying shower noise and magnifying the other sounds in the room.

That sounded very much like Q was crying. Sobbing hysterically, in fact, or she'd never have heard it over the shower. Aspects of the All, what had she done? Horrified, her mind raced ahead to the next logical conclusion-- if Q thought she had set him up to be molested, if he feared she would attack him sexually, he must be terrified. He must be utterly certain that there was no one in the universe he could trust, that the one person he thought he could depend on would betray him.

If she tried to call him now, he would perceive it as another betrayal, another intrusion. She'd been eavesdropping on him, invading his privacy. He might well have gone and hidden in the shower as the one place in the room he could reasonably expect her not to overhear him. As much as it tore at her to do nothing, knowing he was in there sobbing because he thought she'd betrayed him, there was nothing she could safely do until he got out of the shower and composed himself a bit. He wouldn't be able to take an apology when he was this raw; if she let him get his facade back up, she had a much better chance of being believed.

She waited a decorous amount of time before ringing the chime for his room. "What is it?" his voice came, snappishly she thought.

"It's me," she said hesitantly, waiting for an answer to guide her as to what she should say next. When none came, she tried what had worked last time. "I came to apologize."

The door slid open as she was speaking. "Apologize for what?" Q asked. He was dressed for bed, but it was clearly still armor-- ornate silk pajamas in the style of Terran Chinese traditional dress, with a high-necked collar and many, many buttons, and a heavy velour robe wrapped around him.

T'Laren blinked. "Apologize for what" was not the reaction she'd expected. "It seems odd that you should ask that question, when half an hour ago you were screaming at me."

"Oh, for that. You commit so many transgressions, I can't keep track of them all."

"Not only for that," she said. "Q, I am terribly sorry about what happened earlier, on the holodeck. I never meant to put you in that situation, and I am deeply sorry if I caused you any kind of discomfort, then or later-- it was certainly not my intention."

All the blood drained from his face. "You were _spying_ on me," he breathed, as if it were the most horrifying thing he could imagine.

He had cried in front of her before. Why was he reacting this way to the notion that she'd overheard him? "I-- I did hear you crying, yes, but--"

"You voyeuristic, filthy sow, _don't_ try to play games with me!" he shouted, face white with fury. "Tell me, is all this vastly amusing to you? You enjoy tormenting me this way and then gloating over how far I've fallen? Or are you merely trying to collect evidence on exactly how human I am?"

"Q, I've _heard_ you crying before. Why does it disturb you so much--"

"I _told_ you not to play games!" he snarled. "You know quite well what I'm talking about, you disgusting pig. This is all part of some kind of plan, isn't it? Did you put Elejani Baíi up to it?"

"Up to _what? _Q, I came here to apologize for having accidentally put you in a situation that you found uncomfortable. After your reaction to me when you came in tonight, I deduced that you'd become afraid I'd molest you, and then I heard you crying in the shower. I _assumed_ you were crying because you were afraid I'd betrayed you, and I came to assure you this is not true. What does Elejani Baíi have to do with anything? Or are we talking at complete cross-purposes here?"

Q went even paler. "You... didn't hear anything else. Just me crying?"

"I barely heard that much. I wasn't trying to eavesdrop on you, Q, but you were crying loudly enough that I could hear it over the shower."

He walked back to the bed and sank down on it as if everything holding him up was suddenly gone. "You didn't know. You-- oh, no..." Q put his head in his hands.

"What don't I know?" T'Laren asked, following him deeper into the room.

"Well, if you _still_ don't know, I'm certainly not going to _tell_ you," Q snapped, looking up at her for a second. His face was flaming red, which gave T'Laren a clue as to what was really going on here.

"Q..." T'Laren hesitated. He was so easily embarrassed on this subject. "I think we need to discuss what happened today."

"I think we don't," Q retorted, still with head in hands.

She sat down in a chair across from him, folding her arms over her breasts and composing herself to present as asexual a mien as possible. "Some weeks ago, you raised a question-- a fear, really-- that I might molest you. I explained to you why I would not do that, and you seemed to believe me. Do you still believe me?"

"Of course," Q snapped. He looked up again. "You think I'm repulsive-looking. I'd hardly have forgotten _that_."

"I never said that."

Q rolled his eyes. "Of course you didn't. What you _said_, if I recall correctly, was that 'my appearance is not ideal' or some such circumlocution. Which, when translated from therapist-spare-the-patient's-feelings gobbledygook, means, 'Q, you're repulsive-looking.'"

"That is _not_ what it means. I don't think you're repulsive-looking."

"So you admit you lied?"

"I didn't lie. You misinterpreted me. I said, firstly, that you were my patient, and I don't take advantage of my patients. Then I said, 'Your health is poor, your appearance is not the best, and you would make an unattractive meld partner,' due to your fear of telepathy. That last is still true, as is the part about you being my patient. But when I said 'your appearance is not the best', I _meant_ 'you look positively skeletal from illness.' Since then you've regained a good deal of weight and your appearance is much improved. And I _never_ thought you were repulsive, merely that you were unhealthy."

"But you still don't think I'm attractive."

"I think you are quite attractive. I simply am not attracted to you."

"That makes no sense."

She sighed. "Q, among most humanoids it is possible to perceive aesthetic attractiveness without actually feeling sexual desire. For instance, if I were to look at-- oh, take Elejani Baíi for an example, since you brought her up. I can tell that she is quite beautiful, but because she is a woman, I feel no desire for her."

"Why not?" Q asked, sounding utterly bewildered.

"Because I'm heterosexual. So I don't feel desire for women."

"You actually don't feel it? At all?" A thought seemed to occur to him then. "Oh, you mean that mentally you have no desire for them. But your body feels something."

"No, Q," she explained patiently. His lack of comprehension answered the question of his own sexual orientation fairly definitively, she thought. "My body doesn't feel anything. I'm not attracted to women."

"Is this a Vulcan thing?"

In a way, this was hilarious. Q, who claimed to feel no sexual desire at all, apparently made no distinction between aesthetic appreciation and sexual desire. And this was the man who claimed to have a small libido. Uh-huh. "Do you understand the term 'heterosexual'?"

"Certainly I do. I'm hardly stupid, T'Laren. It refers to a person who, for cultural or personal reasons, chooses to engage in sexual activities with members of the opposite sex only. Or, in the case of multi-sexed species, engages only with those partners that make reproduction possible."

"Where did you get that definition from?"

He shrugged. "You pick things up when you're omniscient."

"Obviously you continue to maintain your interpretive bias even when omniscient, however. Heterosexuality has nothing to do with choice. One can behave in a heterosexual fashion without being heterosexual. For instance, for cultural reasons, all female Vulcan citizens who are members of our species behave in either a heterosexual or an asexual fashion. That has nothing to do with their natural inclinations, or what they would desire were they free to choose. I happen to be heterosexual, and I was before I had any sexual experience whatsoever. I simply do not feel desire for women."

"Well, why not? They don't look _that_ different from men."

"It's not a concept that's possible to explain, Q. Take my word for it."

"You also want me to take your word for it that you think I'm attractive but you don't. I _still_ don't understand that. I think that's so much psychobabble on your part, T'Laren." He smiled smugly.

She tried another tack. "It's... as if a male patient were like a brother to me... why are you laughing?"

"You're not going to get anywhere with that analogy either," he predicted. "T'Laren, if the Q had sex, which we don't, but if you could analogize such an undignified and disgusting process to the far more sublime things we do for pleasure with one another... who would we engage in such acts _with_, if not our brothers and sisters? Since, as nearly as I can translate the human concept of sibling, it applies to the relationships of all the Q within the Continuum. So telling me I'm like a brother to you is not going to make your case."

"So you're saying that you feel sexual desire for anyone who you find aesthetically attractive."

"I didn't say that," he said hastily.

"Then what _did_ you say? Since you don't seem to comprehend how the two sensations can be separate--"

"Only to you mortals, since you perceive your bodily sensations as integral parts of your psyche. I don't."

"So what you're saying is that when your mind experiences aesthetic pleasure at looking at someone, your body responds sexually."

He looked embarrassed. "I can't very well control what my body does."

That was a "yes". "What if you find the individual's personality unpleasant?"

"What would that have to do with it?"

"Well... most of us do not want to have sex with people who we don't find pleasant."

"Whatever gave you the idea I wanted to have sex with _anyone? _Sex is disgusting."

Wonderful. His rationalizations to himself that his body was the source of all the sexual feelings he didn't want to deal with, and that they had nothing to do with the real him at all, had left him incapable of modulating physical desire with emotional concerns. "What about children?" she asked, not entirely sure she wanted an answer to this one.

"What about them?"

"If a child was aesthetically attractive, would you-- or rather, your body-- respond to them sexually?"

"I've never seen an aesthetically attractive child. There's nothing that particularly appeals to me about runny noses and grubby faces."

That hardly described all children, but she wasn't going to press him on it. "What about nonhumanoids? Or inanimate objects? You have a large collection of art; I must assume you perceive aesthetic beauty in other than the humanoid form."

"Of course I do. In fact, I consider the humanoid form in general to be fairly hideous, though some individuals rise above their status as hairless monkeys to achieve some measure of beauty."

"Well, do you feel sexual desire for attractive art objects?"

Q recoiled. "You are the most disgusting individual it has ever been my misfortune to encounter."

"I'll take that to mean 'no'," T'Laren said dryly. "My experience of people who are aesthetically attractive but I do not find desirable is similar to that."

Q looked at her sidelong. "You think I'm a work of art?"

"Yes, Q. You're a lovely work of art and I wish only to pose you in my living room, in one of those equally artistic outfits you're so fond of wearing."

"T'Laren. Please try to remember. _I_ am the witty one. You are a Vulcan. I'm growing tired of reminding you."

She ignored that. "So. Now that we have established to everyone's satisfaction that no, you do not repel me, and no, I am not going to molest you, I think we should discuss what happened tonight, instead of sidetracking onto a discussion of heterosexuality, art and wit."

Q laughed. "Too late for that, I'm afraid."

"Well, then, perhaps we can get back on track."

Q did not appear to be paying attention. He was staring into space distractedly. "Q? Can you tell me about what happened in the holodeck?"

"What if I weren't your patient?" he asked suddenly.

"What?"

"Precisely. Your stories are very pretty, T'Laren, but I want some independent corroboration. What if I weren't your patient?"

He was tense, and pretending not to be, his body sculpted into a studied pose of relaxation, but betrayed by his curled hands and pale knuckles. He was obviously trying to pretend that he wanted the answer to catch her in a lie, but since he had to know that she wasn't stupid enough to slip if she were lying, his motives were transparently something else. "Are you attracted to me, Q?" she asked calmly.

He maintained his perfect insouciant pose, apparently unaware of the slow red flush betraying him. "Not at all. I'm merely wondering how thoroughly to trust your answer. And you haven't answered the question."

She should have expected that. Q would never answer such a painfully revealing question without getting assurances from her first-- he would never put himself into such a vulnerable position. This was not territory T'Laren wanted to be dealing with-- she wanted Q to be able to talk to her about anything, without being entangled in questions about her feelings toward him or his toward her. It would be better if he still perceived her as essentially asexual. But she knew better than that, too-- Q was physically much healthier than he'd been, and emotionally as vulnerable to transference as any patient. In fact, given his lack of friends and support structure, he might be more vulnerable than most people, despite his formidable defenses. They had to talk about this, to bring it out into the light so it wouldn't run like a subterranean undercurrent beneath all their interactions. "If we had met under completely different circumstances, and you didn't go out of your way to antagonize me immediately, then yes, I might well have found you attractive. You can be quite charming when you want to be, and I tend to prefer highly intelligent men. Does that set your mind at ease?"

He shrugged. "You _could_ just be saying that. Damage control and all that."

"Sooner or later you're going to have to make a decision as to whether you trust me not to lie to you. I'm not going to be very effective in helping you if you think everything I say might be a lie."

"True."

"On the other hand, I have a suspicion that _you_ have lied to me. Or at the very least, attempted to mislead. Why were you panicking over my attire earlier?"

"Panicking is hardly the word I would use."

"You're well-known for playing games with semantics. For instance, you're perfectly capable of answering a question about your own feelings 'no' when anyone else would have said 'yes' because of the artificial distinction you make between your bodily sensations and your personal will."

"What does that have to do with anything?" he asked belligerently.

His defenses were far less coherent, and yet more desperate, than she'd ever seen them. Q didn't usually say things quite _that_ obtuse, even at his worse, and she could see his carefully constructed facade of control starting to fracture, and the raw panic underneath. "You know perfectly well," she said. "Q, listen to me. If you are physically attracted to me-- which, aside from your fearing that I might molest you, is the only reason I can think of for your reaction to my exercise session--"

"You're making mountains out of molehills. I merely thought your appearance debased and animalistic."

"Which, I suppose, would explain your strenuous objections the last several times you saw me exercising?" she asked dryly. "The most significant difference between my exercise session tonight, and the one you walked in on in your pajamas back on _Ketaya_ a few days before we got here, is that you are physically much healthier, have put on more weight, and seem generally less depressed-- all factors that would act to restore your libido to more normal levels. Earlier, I drew the wrong conclusion, because another difference is that today I brought you into a holodeck session in which someone touched you and you reacted very badly. My first guess was that you felt that the holodeck character had molested you, that it was my fault, and that you feared I'd do the same. But that isn't it, is it, Q?"

"You're the psychologist. You figure it out."

"Well, then. My best hypothesis is that you are attracted to me physically, and that you are afraid of and disturbed by your own feelings."

Q leaned forward, trying a different tactic. "Are you sure you're not projecting your own fantasies onto me, dear doctor?" he said coolly. "You just admitted that you find _me_ attractive, after all. Wouldn't it be far more gratifying to your ego to believe your disgusting fancies were reciprocated?"

"I must be right, then. You're never so vicious, or quite so willing to contradict the facts we both know, as when I'm on the right track." She was annoyed with him-- she had spent a good deal of time explaining to him that she was _not_ attracted to him, but might have been if he hadn't been her patient, and as usual he was discarding the facts in favor of making his point. But snapping back at him wouldn't gain anything-- Q wouldn't be doing this if he weren't terrified. "Q, you needn't fight me so hard. If you are physically attracted to me-- or your body is, at any right-- that's an entirely natural and normal occurrence. People become attracted to their therapists all the time. It's called 'transference.' In fact, it often manifests as the patients believing they are in love with the therapists."

"How repulsive. I certainly don't suffer from _that_ delusion."

"Of course not. But I would find it surprising if you hadn't started to find me attractive. I spend a great deal of time with you, I act as your confidant and your closest advisor, and now that you're feeling better I suspect that you're likely experiencing many more sexual feelings than you did when you were suicidal and half-dead. Your body would probably latch onto anyone close to you who was not ill-formed at this point."

"But you're above all that, of course," he said bitterly.

"I'm trained to have defenses against this sort of thing. You aren't."

"And your defenses are, of course, so finely honed and so exquisitely Vulcan in their perfection."

"No, you misunderstand. My defenses are as much because I'm a psychologist as because I'm a Vulcan. Therapy invokes powerful emotions, Q. The therapist steps into a role that normally only family, friends and lovers occupy in a patient's life. It's easy for a patient to convince himself that a therapist is a best friend or a potential lover... and unfortunately, the therapist can sometimes be just as easily convinced of the same thing. That's called 'countertransference', and it's almost as common as transference. The reason there are strict ethical prohibitions against a therapist becoming sexually involved with a client isn't just that it's easy for an unscrupulous therapist to pressure a vulnerable client into having sex, but because it's painfully easy for therapist and patient to become mutually convinced they are in love. But that 'love', while it is real in the sense that it's a genuine and powerful emotion, is artificially evoked by the situation. The therapist should ideally be working to make the patient no longer dependent on the therapist, and a therapist suffering from countertransference hasn't as great a motive-- people don't want their loved ones to be independent of them."

"Why not? It would be enormously dull if they weren't."

"Perhaps for a Q. Human emotion thrives on interdependency, however. Patients may lose their motivation to get well, when getting well would involve the loss of the therapist's care, which they interpret as love. So for the protection of both parties, therapists must learn to recognize and master feelings of countertransference within themselves. And my Vulcan training makes me much better at it than many therapists. So you're not in any danger."

"I wouldn't be anyway," he said harshly. "None of this nonsense applies to me. The idea of being dependent on _anyone_, even a putative 'loved one', makes me nauseous. In fact, the notion of love makes me nauseous. I certainly am not in love with you, and even if I were, I would be uninterested in being dependent on you. We're just friends, and I am perfectly happy with that."

She wondered if she should point out to him that they weren't even really that-- he was assigning her the value of "friend" because of the role she played in his life, not realizing that that was as artificial as assigning her the value of "lover" would be-- but there really was no kind way to tell someone that they weren't even friends, and after Q had stopped fighting her on the question of whether he was attracted to her or not, a tacit admission that he was, she couldn't cut him down that way. "Few patients are as fiercely independent or as strong-willed as you are, Q. I'm glad you're comfortable with our relationship as it stands, but I do want to make sure we both understand what that relationship is, and what it entails."

Q leaned back. "This should be entertaining."

"As you've seen, my style of therapy includes physical contact, if I feel the patient needs it and can handle it. You seem to need some level of physical contact-- backrubs, for instance. As long as you're comfortable with that, I don't see any problem with continuing to do that. But if you ever do feel uncomfortable being touched by me, in any way, I want you to tell me immediately, and I'll stop. I will try to avoid making you uncomfortable by exercising in front of you, if I can, and in return I want you to feel free to talk to me, as you have been, without worrying about whether I might think less of you. I become completely ineffective as a therapist if you decide you need to impress me, or to censor yourself when talking to me, because of the desires your body experiences. Will you do that?"

He shrugged elaborately. "I suppose I can manage that."

"I'm glad. So will you tell me about what happened in the holodeck today?"

"Nothing to tell. You were there."

"I was, yes. But my interpretation of events may well be different than yours."

Q sighed. "I don't see the point."

"You were very upset, Q. If that had happened in a real life situation, you would have been terribly humiliated by your own reaction. I'd think you'd want to seek to avoid that, in the future."

"It seems fairly simple to me. Avoid bars, and don't buy drinks for prostitutes."

"That will not prevent people from making a physical pass at you." T'Laren leaned forward. "Q, the entire reason for the scenario training is to acquaint you with human reactions. It would be natural for a human who finds you attractive to put her hand on your leg, and if it was a woman, it probably wouldn't occur to her that that might upset you."

"More of the human double standard?"

"Human males are somewhat more statistically likely to desire sex with random female strangers than vice versa. And the sort of woman who would be overly bold like that also might not care if she offended you, or assume that she is sufficiently attractive that her intentions will appeal to you."

"And they call _me_ arrogant."

"You are arrogant. Just not about sex. Which might well make you more intriguing to some than the sort of person who is convinced he knows everything there is to know and that sexual partners should be swooning at his feet."

"You sound like you're speaking from experience."

"I've known a certain share of sexually arrogant men, yes. The sort of man who believes he can seduce a married Vulcan woman with his good looks and charm generally has a weak notion of his own sexual limitations."

"People like, oh, Tris for example."

He was so transparent, T'Laren almost smiled. "No, Tris is not an example."

"Well? You _did_ say men who try to seduce married Vulcan women..."

"Tris didn't try," T'Laren said solemnly. "He succeeded. I'd say that demonstrates a fine understanding of his limitations."

Q scowled slightly. "How enormously talented of him."

"At the moment, I would rather talk about you than Tris. Why did you react that way when the prostitute touched you?"

He sighed defeatedly. "You just don't give up, do you."

"Rarely."

Q stared into nothing, face flushed. "My-- I... you were right, when you said... about my body... being healthier now. I-- I'd started to think... I'd be free of this. That was the only good thing about being depressed. My body hadn't... had... reactions... in a few months..." It seems to be growing progressively more difficult for him to speak.

"But it's coming back," she suggested.

"Yes." Q was clearly mortified.

"Did your body--" She was careful not to say 'you', knowing he needed the distancing mechanism of pretending it was his body only-- "experience a reaction to the hologram woman?"

"I can't control what it does!" Q shouted suddenly. "I don't _want_ to feel these things, but I can't-- I can't make it stop..."

"No one can," T'Laren said gently. "At least, no humans, and 99% of all humanoids. Most Vulcans are an exception, I think, but certainly humans have no control over when they feel desire and who it's for."

"So I suppose you're totally immune," he said bitterly.

"I said most Vulcans. Aside from the fact that I require telepathic contact, my libido is almost indistinguishable from a human's. My ability to lack desire for a patient is one many human doctors practice successfully. But I have had serious problems... with inappropriate sexual urges, in the past."

"Inappropriate? Like what, fetishes for socks?"

"Vulcans are entirely monogamous, and we do not mate outside of... well, you may have heard of a Vulcan mating cycle. I believe most Vulcans do not have sex outside the cycle. When my marriage and sanity started falling apart, I began to find it impossible to remain celibate for seven years at a time."

"Seven _years_?" Q choked. "What is the _point? _Either you don't have sex at all or you do. Why would you do it and then _not_ do it for seven years?"

"It's not something I want to discuss."

"I've talked about plenty of things _I_ didn't want to discuss."

"And you're sidetracking from them. I could easily understand you experiencing a physical reaction to the hologram. Why did it panic you so badly, though? You fell out of your chair and screamed at her not to touch you, as if she'd just tried to rape you in public. That seems like an overreaction."

"It does, does it?"

"After incidents like the one with LeBeau, you cannot afford to overreact so badly. What happened?"

Q hesitated for several seconds. "I thought... I thought she might... try to..."

He stopped there, without elaborating. T'Laren filled in the blanks. "She was a hologram, Q. They don't do anything you don't want them to, and you can turn them off if you wish. She couldn't have done anything you didn't want."

"That's the problem," Q muttered.

"You were afraid you might want to?"

"No!" he snapped automatically, and then reconsidered. "Sometimes... if my body wants something too much... I can't control it. Like, like falling asleep. Or screaming if it hurts. Even if I want not to do it, I can't stop myself. Like that."

T'Laren nodded, finally beginning to believe she understood. "You fear your body subverting your will."

Q nodded quickly, almost eagerly. "Like that, yes."

"But by reacting to that fear as you did, you open yourself to potential humiliation. I don't think I need to tell you that if it had been real humans you'd done that in front of, instead of holograms, you would have suffered deep humiliation."

"Like I didn't?" Q muttered.

"Not to the extent you would have with anyone other than me in the room."

"So what am I supposed to do about it?" he asked harshly. "Put a 'Do Not Touch Me' sign on my chest?"

"I think we should continue the scenario training. This sort of situation is one you can learn to handle gracefully, as with most human endeavors."

"If I get molested on a regular basis, I'll learn to smile through it, is that it?"

"I hope you never have to learn how far from genuine molestation what happened to you today was," T'Laren said softly.

"Oh, I know. You don't need to tell me. It was nothing at all," Q said, sarcastic and bitter. "Nothing I suffer ever is."

"Your suffering is not nothing, Q. It is undeniable that these things cause you pain, and if most normal humans had to function under the level of physical and psychological pain you experience regularly, they would turn to addictive psychoactives or religion or destructive behavior to escape. But many of the things that cause you to suffer cause at most mild discomfort in humans. Part of what I see as my goal is to teach you what kinds of suffering you can fix by changing your behavior, and what kinds you must simply learn to deal with. Nothing you do will prevent people from touching you, not unless you take up residence on Vulcan. You must learn to handle it."

Q sighed tiredly. "As pleasant as the prospect may seem at the moment, I really would rather not condemn myself to the utter dullness of the planet Vulcan, so I suppose it behooves me to do as you suggest."

She nodded, acknowledging his capitulation. For a minute, then, they sat in silence. Finally Q stood up. "It's exceedingly late, and I for one need sleep, though I suppose you don't. You can go back to your little exercise session."

This might be a good sign-- Q rarely ended a conversation just so he could sleep. Perhaps he was finally taking more responsibility for his health. T'Laren stood as well. "That's a good idea. Good night, Q."

* * *

Q had had just barely four hours of sleep when his communicator chimed.

The fact that he slept lightly in no way meant that he woke up quickly; he was easily roused out of sleep, but full mental capacity usually required massive infusions of coffee. Q answered the comm in fine morning humor. "What?" he snarled, or would have snarled if his voice wasn't bleared with sleep.

"Come over," Markow's synthesized voice said. "I have something important to show you."

Q rolled over and looked at the chronometer. "It's 0800 hours, Daedalus! Don't you ever sleep?"

"Not at 0800 hours. If you don't come over you're going to regret it. I think what I've found is more important than your beauty sleep."

Q sighed in an exceedingly put-upon fashion. "I'll be right there."

Seeing Markow hardly required full formal dress, and Q wanted to get this over with so he could get some sleep before the conference. So he dressed with uncharacteristic speed and stalked out.

It was a comfort to him that Markow did not look bright and rested. He wasn't even in his wheelchair, in fact-- he was lying in bed, in a dressing gown, looking up at various holographic displays on the ceiling. "Prop me up against the pillows and I can move the display down." His voice was coming from a speaker by the bed, but the subvocalizer was in a band around his forehead, not at his throat as it had been for Q when he had needed one. The device would catch the neural signals Markow's brain sent out to the destroyed nervous wiring of his body, and translate that into speech.

"Do I look like your assistant?" Q asked sharply, moving to do it anyway. It was hardly the first time Markow had made such a demand-- they'd all kept ludicrous hours while working against the Borg, and despite the hordes of eagerly worshipful scientists who'd have done anything Peter Markow asked with gratitude, Markow had tended to direct his requests to Q, mostly to annoy him, Q thought. The first few times he'd done it, he'd been terrified of hurting Markow-- the human was so fragile that Q had felt like a huge clumsy ox, handling him, as well as mildly disgusted at having to touch him-- but now he could be casual about it.

"Probably not. He looks about twenty years younger than you, and not nearly as haggard."

"Flattery will get you nowhere, Daedalus. What was so vitally important that you had to drag me out of bed?" He gently lifted the ravaged, light body and moved it back, propping Markow against the pillows. "And where's your assistant, anyway?"

"Still asleep. It's good for your humility to have to do work with your hands every so often."

"What humility?"

"That's my point. Take a look at the readouts. Computer, move readouts perpendicular."

The readouts moved to inhabit the space in front of Q and Markow. Q perused them for a minute and a half. Nothing was clicking. "I don't see--"

"Computer, magnify grid alpha, fifteen, three."

A part of the display grew large. Q focused on it... and went cold. "When did these readings come in?" he asked harshly.

"This morning. I called you as soon as I had them."

"There's got to be a mistake. Eighth-dimensional waveforms should be reflected by the Anomaly. They should _not_ be able to pass through, even with a refraction index that high."

"There probably is a mistake, Lucy, but it's probably yours. I ordered the scans in triplicate to be sure."

"The engineering department told _me_ they couldn't broadcast eighth-dimensional waveforms."

"I called in some favors from my postdocs and got them to convince the engineers." He turned his head toward Q jerkily, more motion than Q had ever seen him perform; it set the rest of his body trembling uncontrollably. Q sat down on the bed so Markow could look straight at him.

"Do you need me to get your assistant?"

"I'll live," Markow said. "I'm sorry, Lucy."

Q stiffened. "Sorry for what?"

"It was an elegant theory. I'm sorry to prove you wrong."

"Science is about proving people wrong, Daedalus, or hadn't you noticed?" Q responded, still stiff, his mind reeling. He was wrong. He couldn't be wrong. "What made you think to look here?"

"There's a flaw in your equation," Markow answered. "Or rather, a place where it doesn't have to do what you say it has to do. I plugged in a few other variables, altered a constant-- computer, display Markow notes, today's date, page 7-- and got different behavior."

"And if you took the square root of c instead of the square, you could get e=mc squared to say that you can go faster than light in normal space," Q snapped. "That doesn't make it true."

"It turns out it is, though. Look." Markow's notes were displayed, with the damning altered equation that couldn't exist, that Markow had pulled out of thin air and that reflected nothing Q knew about the universe, that couldn't possibly be valid... except that it described the data far better than his own equation. Q felt much as he had when Guinan had kneed him in the crotch, except that this time it was his mind, not his body, that was reeling, crippled, unable to breathe.

"I suppose congratulations are in order," Q said coldly. "You've just invalidated the results of millions of years of research."

"You're not used to being wrong, are you?"

Q had never been wrong. Not about physics. He _couldn't_ be wrong. Even now, his mind was insisting that there must be a mistake, some catch, this couldn't be, that given all he knew of the universe it just wasn't possible.

And yet there it was. Glaring at him.

"Obviously you're a talented fellow, Daedalus. Why don't you follow up on this like a good little researcher? I want to get some decent sleep before the conference starts."

He stalked out, hearing Markow repeat in his synthetic, monotone voice, "I'm sorry."

That was even worse, the capper to a perfectly awful situation. Markow _pitied_ him. Markow, who thought pity was the most utterly degrading emotion in existence, felt sorry for him. How much lower could he fall?

In an absolute panic, he stumbled back to his quarters and went to T'Laren's room, leaning on the comm button for several seconds. It took him a second to realize that she had said "Come in," a second in which the door was already swooshing open.

T'Laren was sitting up on her bed, wearing a decorous white nightgown-- Q wouldn't have been awfully surprised if it was flannel. It didn't look as if she'd actually slept _in_ the bed, barely as if she'd slept at all-- her curls were unmussed, the bed neat and only slightly indented in the center.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"What's wrong? My life is over, that's what's wrong." He gestured wildly, emphasizing his point, as he paced in a panic, terror driving him around the tiny room in circles. "No one is ever going to listen to me again. I'll be a laughingstock."

"Why?"

"Why? _Why?_" It was on the tip of his tongue to savage her for her obtuseness when he remembered that she didn't know. As much as it seemed like a lifetime ago that he'd gotten the call from Markow, it really had only been a few minutes. "Peter Markow has ruined my life," Q pronounced dramatically. He sank down into a chair and tiredly pressed his hand to his forehead. "And it's not even his fault. _He's_ only doing what he's supposed to. I wouldn't have expected any less." He looked up. "But he pities me! He used to tell me that pitying someone was an announcement that you think they're desperately pathetic and beyond hope. He certainly doesn't pity _other_ people he proves wrong. Only me."

"He proved you wrong?" T'Laren asked.

"I _can't_ be wrong. I'm a Q! I may not remember _everything_ from the old days, but I certainly don't remember things _wrong_." For a moment, the horrid thought struck him that perhaps he wouldn't know it if he did... but no. He couldn't believe that. "If I know something, I can't be wrong about it... but he's got data that says I am. He's gone and changed my equations, did you know that? Now they make no sense whatsoever." He buried his head back in his hands, overwhelmed by despair. "I'm ruined."

T'Laren stood up and came over to his chair, her hand on the back of the chair, almost touching him. "Tell me what happened," she said gently. Part of him desperately wished she _would_ touch him, wanted someone to hold him and comfort him. The ascendant part, however, lashed out in rage. He wasn't crying, wasn't broken, and he certainly didn't need hugs and kisses at the moment. And that T'Laren would make an overture now was unbearable, proof that she, too, thought him pitiful and unworthy.

He jerked away from her proximity and up, out of the chair, pacing again. "Markow's found data that disproves my theory. Which up until twenty minutes ago I'd have said was a fact, not a theory, but it seems I'm wrong." He couldn't keep the bitterness out of his voice.

"Could it simply be that you were mistaken about the application of your theory? That what you believed to be true _is_ true, but simply doesn't apply to this situation?"

Q gave her a look. "Of _course_ what I believe to be true, is. That's not the point. The point is, this singularity behaves exactly like one of our Anomalies, _except_ that eighth-dimensional waveforms and probably higher can penetrate it, and nothing in all my experience tells me why such a thing should be or even how it _can_ be. It's impossible, is what it is, but there it is." He paced frantically. "I'm ruined. Totally ruined."

"Why are you ruined?"

"Don't be stupid!" Q whirled on her, almost grateful for the stupid question, as it gave him an excuse to tear her apart and thus take out some of his frustrations. "Do you think the Federation is going to devote an entire starbase to the care and defense of just another fallible mortal? My only value is that I _know_ the secrets of the universe, otherwise they'd be delighted to abandon me in the gutter somewhere. There are people who would be positively thrilled if that happened. And then I'd be able to count my life in weeks. Once it gets out that I was wrong, I'm literally a dead man."

"I think you're wrong. Starfleet won't abandon you for such a small thing. Just because you were wrong once doesn't seriously diminish your value."

"You don't know what you're talking about!" Q howled. "My _value_ is that I know everything! If I don't know everything, I have no value!" He was frighteningly close to tears. Q took a deep breath, forcing them down, but the rage and panic were still with him. "I have to leave. Today. I can't go back and face them. Maybe we can use the ship, stay one step ahead of my enemies if I keep moving..." Until such time as one of them intercepted him, he thought bitterly, and couldn't control his trembling. His life was over.

"Q. You're overreacting. I know Starfleet, and the Federation, and I know they will _not_ rescind your protection for one incorrect theory."

"Why not?' Q demanded. She was just trying to make him feel better, to soothe him with comforting lies, and he hated that. "Any mortal can give them theories. _Markow_ can give them theories, and they don't have to dedicate an entire starbase to protecting _him_."

"If Markow had as many enemies as you do, they probably would dedicate an entire starbase to protecting him. Q, let's be ruthlessly practical. Have you any idea of the sheer monetary worth of the advances you have made?"

"Monetary worth?" Q looked at her disdainfully. "The Federation doesn't use money."

"That's a fairly common misconception."

"No, I know people have credits and all, but _internally_, the Federation doesn't use money. Credits are for dealing with outside societies." Her expression troubled him. Had he gotten this one wrong too? "Isn't that right?"

T'Laren sighed. "No. _You've_ never needed to use credits, because you were living on a starbase. Anderson could access your personal accounts to buy you the things you requested--"

"Personal accounts?"

"I take it they never told you that you have a personal account. With a sizable sum of money in it."

"No, I..." Q shook his head. He would not be distracted. Money was useless and wouldn't save him if the Federation threw him out. "It doesn't matter anyway. The point is that you can't _put_ a monetary value on what I do."

"Actually, it is possible, and it has been done. I don't have the exact figures, Q, but I'm fairly sure that the scientific advances you are responsible for pay several times what your upkeep is worth. Your value is far greater than 'never being wrong.' You yourself pointed out the political advantages to the Federation in having you-- that the scientific advances you're responsible for resulted in better warp drives, better weaponry, better shielding than we had previously, giving us more negotiating room with other races. Do you think that Starfleet Command would consider for a moment giving up the source of more such advances for one mistake?"

"I..." He wanted to believe her, desperately wanted to believe that his life had not just ended. But he was so afraid of deluding himself, so afraid that he'd believe because he wanted to. "You don't know Starfleet the way _I_ do. You know the pretty side, the side all its members want to believe in so badly. They were your friends, after all. You were never placed under house arrest for trying to assert your basic rights as a sentient being, or had most of your possessions taken away for the crime of trying to kill yourself. Starfleet hates me. They'd jump at the chance to be rid of me."

"Don't be ridiculous," T'Laren said mildly. "They did all those things to you because you were valuable, and they wanted to make sure you continued to produce. Given a choice between letting you go entirely, where not only your personal enemies, but Federation enemies like the Romulans or Cardassians could get hold of you, for the sake of one mistake, or keeping you under protection even though they may need to run more analyses to validate what you tell them than they're accustomed to, no one at Starfleet Command would be stupid enough to choose the first."

"Don't you mean 'illogical'?" he snapped back at her. "What a typical Vulcan reaction, assuming humans can't possibly be stupid."

"You forget, I grew up among humans. I know just how stupid they can be. But Q, Starfleet Command doesn't know you personally, not like Anderson. And they _will_ make their decision based on your value, since they've never met you personally."

He conceded that point and latched onto the next one, his fear entirely untouched by his acceptance of what T'Laren was telling him. "Well, the scientists here _do_ know me personally." Q paced in circles. "I can't go to the conference. I can't face them. I _can't_."

"Why not?"

"Because!" How could she be so dense? "_They_ expect me to know everything, even if Starfleet doesn't. How can I face them, with a mistake like that hanging over my head?"

"Q, being wrong is part of science. If they truly expect you to be an infallible oracle, they're setting both themselves and you up for a fall-- it's for the best that they learn otherwise."

"You don't understand. I've stood up in front of those people setting myself up as an authority, ridiculing them for their stupid little theories when they haven't thought things out properly. Now I'm supposed to stand up in front of them and tell them _I'm_ wrong? How can I do that?" He heard what he was saying and cringed. Now T'Laren was going to give him a lecture about not ridiculing people.

She surprised him. "The same way they do it. They can keep coming back to the meetings despite the fact that you ridicule them. You certainly can do anything they can do."

_Can I? _Q thought bleakly. "It's different. _They_ aren't authority figures to _me_."

"But they're authority figures to their peers, and having you tear them apart in public is bound to be very humiliating for them. But they can take it."

"All right! So I'm a coward, a worthless person, I can dish it out but I can't take it. T'Laren, I _can't_ face them, I don't care what you say, I can't..."

"I see." T'Laren nodded. "It's only to be expected, with your inexperience in these matters. After all, everyone in the Continuum was always entirely loving and supportive every time you made a mistake, isn't that right? You have no experience facing ridicule at all."

"Where did you get that cockeyed notion from?" Q asked, staring at her disbelievingly. "_I_ never told you the Continuum tolerated mistakes. Quite the opposite. If a child screws up, we consider it our sworn duty to make fun of them until they wish they were dead."

"Really." Her voice was completely matter-of-fact, but Q realized suddenly that he had just fallen directly into her trap. He scowled, reddening. If he hadn't been so distraught, he would have recognized the sarcasm in that statement a mile away; it was a further humiliation that he'd actually fallen for it.

"But that's different! That's the Continuum. We all _know_ our older siblings have our best interests at heart, even if we find it hard to believe when we're young and stupid. It's a learning experience." At her studiedly bland expression, his ire rose. He exploded, "This is _not_ a learning experience, T'Laren! These people aren't my older siblings, and I don't need to put up with them humiliating me!"

"What would you rather? To be humiliated behind your back and be powerless to stop it, as everyone mocks you for not having the courage to face your accusers? Or to be there and to be graceful about it, to show them that they cannot drag you down no matter what they say?" She walked over to him. "Q. Most of them probably will not make fun of you. They understand that science is a risky business for the ego, sometimes. Remember that _most_ of them grew up in a culture where it's considered proper to show compassion for those who have faltered... of all the cultures I've ever encountered, yours is the only one that makes an ideal out of humiliating people to teach them life lessons. Some few may take the opportunity to insult you, but why would you care what they think? If you accept your mistake graciously, they will look like petty little fools for attacking you."

"T'Laren, _everyone_ in academia is a petty little fool. That won't stop them."

"Then you'll succeed in making them look bad. I wouldn't think that would bother you," she said dryly.

"They won't look bad! Everyone does it!"

"They will indeed look bad. Q," she placed a hand on his arm, "I understand that you're afraid of being embarrassed. But you must understand that this is common in academia. No one but you is likely to make a big deal about it. However, if you do not go, you will draw people's attention by your absence, and then your enemies may realize that this issue is important to you. You are far safer in going than not."

"How could you possibly understand how I feel? You're probably used to failing at things. You've never been in a position where you couldn't imagine being wrong, and then you were."

She sighed. "I don't suppose the fact that I almost failed out of the Academy my first semester counts."

"You almost failed out of the Academy?" Get her talking about herself and then she wouldn't make him go. Besides, Q liked to hear stories about T'Laren's sordid past... it made her more real to him, less the untouchable paragon of virtue she liked to pretend to be.

T'Laren moved away from him and sat down. "When I was in school, as a child, it was very easy for me to do well," she said. "Vulcan discipline lends itself to eidetic memory. I don't have that, but what I do remember, I remember forever. And Vulcan discipline lends itself also to thinking out what one learns, working out the logical implications, making connections to the other facts you know. So I consistently got A's, without working very hard at it.

"When I went to the Academy, for the first time I was competing against other Vulcans, who were far better at the disciplines than I was. And in those areas where I excelled in comparison to the typical Vulcan, many other students were superior to me. I ended up failing almost every exam I took for four weeks, and barely passed the semester."

She looked at him significantly. "But it didn't happen again. Once I'd learned that the amount of effort I was accustomed to putting into my schoolwork wasn't enough, I simply changed my behavior, and put in more effort. It was terribly humiliating for me to fail exams, especially as there was... someone... better at the disciplines than I was, who was watching over my shoulder and whose expectations it was very important to me to live up to. But I learned from it, and didn't do it again."

"Have you ever considered embroidering moral homilies?" Q asked. "Or perhaps writing improving texts for children?"

"Simply because the statement sounds like a moral of the story doesn't make it less true," T'Laren said. "Q, you _can_ do this. And it will almost certainly be worse for you if you don't."

He couldn't think of an objection to that, aside from the fact that he still didn't want to. "I... suppose," he said grudgingly.

"Come on. Eat some breakfast, take a shower, put on one of your more attractive outfits, and I'm sure you'll feel better."

* * *

Hours later at the conference, having taken a shower and put on one of his more attractive outfits, Q did not feel much better at all.

It was far too early, for one thing. Markow had woken him far earlier than he was accustomed, but even after his talk with T'Laren, going back to sleep had been out of the question, even if he'd had time. For that matter, eating was out of the question, and though Q felt nauseous at the thought of food, he also felt a certain hollowness and a headache from not having eaten. He was punchy, wired from the things he'd been through this morning, exhausted but far too tense to consider sleeping.

That tension had impelled him to actually show up at the conference on time. If he had to go, and T'Laren had insisted that he did, he couldn't handle the suspense of waiting. That, of course, had been on the theory that _Markow_ would show on time. He was ten minutes late, and Q was wound like a clock spring, feeling like he might explode out of his skin at any second.

They were reading the minutes of yesterday's meeting, an interminable process. Why it was necessary when one could read the minutes oneself on the computer, Q had no idea. He tapped his fingers on the desk restlessly, certain he was going to go out of his mind.

Markow rolled in at a leisurely pace fifteen minutes late, followed by his entirely too bright-and-cheerful-looking assistant. Q almost jumped out of his seat and shouted "Where have you _been_?" or something. It was all he could do to hold himself still and wait, as Markow waited for reasons incomprehensible to Q for the minutes to be done.

Sovaz looked up from her reading of yesterday's proceedings. "Does anyone have any new findings to present?"

"I do," Markow announced.

Q realized he was sitting on the edge of his seat, and forced himself to sit back and pretend to be relaxed. It was, he discovered, every bit as challenging a task as pretending to be relaxed when he was waiting for enemy aliens to break through Starbase 56's defenses and kill him. In some ways it was worse. He had had a reasonable expectation, during the attacks, that Starfleet would _probably_ succeed in protecting him. Here, not only was he not certain he would not be shredded to bits after Markow's presentation, he was in fact positive he _would_ be.

"I twisted some arms in the engineering department and got them to run an analysis of eighth-dimensional waveforms," Markow was saying, as the image of various graphs that he and Q had looked at this morning came up on the holodisplay. "As you can see, there appears to be a contradiction to our working theories. I ran it past Q, and we agreed that the Anomaly is displaying... hem... anomalous behavior." Markow needed to telegraph the joke with pauses and an artificial "hem", since he couldn't change the tone of his voice enough to express it that way. The artificiality of the pun grated like fingernails against Q's brain. "It's clear to us that for reasons we haven't yet determined, the anomaly is not behaving completely within the parameters Q set out in the meeting a few days ago."

Who was this "we" Markow kept mentioning, Q wondered? And then, with sick horror, he realized _he_ was the other half of that "we". Markow was trying to soften the blow by implying that Q had been involved in Markow's research beyond their tense meeting this morning, by giving some of his rightful credit-- the lifeblood of researchers-- to Q, when it was entirely undeserved. Out of pity, Q thought, and felt suddenly, acutely nauseous. How much humiliation was he expected to take in one day?

"Why would that be?" someone asked.

"We don't know yet. It appears that the value of the constant _b_ is considerably lower than Q suggested. Computer, enlarge grid 4." One of the graphs increased in size.

Q sat there in a welter of agonized humiliation as the discussion continued around him. Finally someone, in an exceedingly misguided attempt to draw him out, asked, "Have you any theories as to why this is, Q?"

"How would I know?" Q snapped. "It's not behaving like anything in _my_ experience."

"How is that possible?" Milarca asked. "I thought your experience encompassed the entire physical nature of the universe."

"It does."

"Then how can this be outside your experience?"

"When you find out, I'd be delighted if you'd tell me."

"Are you saying that this Anomaly reflects something from outside this universe?" Malo Ren, the Bajoran physicist, asked.

"Let me guess. The Prophets appeared to you in a vision and gave you your degree in physics, right?" Q asked with as much sarcasm as he could muster.

Malo flushed. "Well, if you don't know what it is, what business do you have ridiculing people for proposing theories?" he asked hotly.

"Because your theories are _stupid_. Now, pay attention this time. When the boundary of an entirely separate universe touches ours, gravity is annihilated. Can you say 'gravity'? It's just three syllables. Maybe if you sound it out slowly--"

"Q, this is totally unnecessary," Dhawan snapped. "Since you don't know what it is, why don't you yield the floor to someone who might give us a direction to look in?"

"Fine. Look in however many wrong directions you want to. Just don't come crying to me when all your theories turn out to be hogwash," Q declared, and folded his arms.

"Oh, no. Poor baby's going to sulk," Yalit declared toothily, with great glee.

Markow made an artificial throat clearing noise. "What Q was trying to explain, in his usual tactful fashion, is that, since gravitation is annihilated at the boundaries of an intrusion of one universe to another, this can't be the gateway to another universe, as the gravitation isn't behaving appropriately."

"How do we know that's true?" LeBeau asked belligerently. "We have only Q's word for it that gravitation really is annihilated at the boundaries between universes, and he's just been proven a less reliable source than we thought."

Someone Q didn't know said, "The gravitational theory explains the observed phenomena, though. When you do a tabulation of known dimensional crossings, the nadion concentrations really _do_ drop."

"According to _his_ figures," LeBeau said. "Has anyone done an independent analysis?"

This was exactly what he'd feared, exactly what he'd expected. Q retreated into himself and tried to pretend he was somewhere else while maintaining an unchanging contemptuous scowl on his face.

"Computer," Sovaz said. "Tabulate the nadion concentrations associated with all spatiotemporal anomalies in the databanks. Link to the Vulcan Academy of Science, the Daystrom Institute, the Makropyrios, and the Meldat School, retrieve all data regarding spatiotemporal anomalies, and include that in tabulation. Address Memory Alpha to determine if Starfleet Archives hold any information on such anomalies that _Yamato_ does not possess, and include any such information in the tabulation. Divide tabulation into four columns-- anomalies known to be related to other universes, anomalies known to be related to other causes, unknown anomalies and total-- and index each."

"Requested operation will take three hours to complete."

"Begin." Sovaz raised her head and addressed the group. "I strongly doubt that information collected from all the Federation's major repositories of astrophysical data will differ much from the data already held aboard _Yamato_, which Q used in the tabulation he demonstrated to us several days ago. However, if it will stop this unproductive speculation about Q's reliability, I am perfectly willing to address every single database accessible to _Yamato,_ if necessary."

LeBeau looked away. "That's hardly necessary. What you're doing should be an adequate check, Lieutenant."

"Of course," Yalit said, "just because _one_ independent validation bears out doesn't mean _everything_ Q says is written in latinum. After all, we've seen him carelessly overlook a full spectrum of testing for _one_ phenomenon, and turn out to be wrong since he was so convinced he was right. Sloppy work, if you ask me--"

"--which nobody did," Harry Roth muttered.

Yalit ignored him. "Maybe everything Q's ever submitted to the Federation should undergo a second review. Just to be sure. If his knowledge is capable of having such holes in it--"

"And exactly who are you to talk about what I do and do not know?" Q asked coldly. He turned toward her, almost grateful for the attack, for an opportunity to shred somebody into paste. "It's interesting, Yalit, that you're usually the first one to complain about _my_ knowledge, and yet you've imparted none of your own to the conference. You haven't presented a theory or even contributed considerably to any that have been proposed. Do you want to know why?"

"Do I care why?" she snapped back.

Q smiled maliciously. "Perhaps you don't, but _someone_ should," he said. "I've reviewed your work, Professor Yalit, _all_ of it, and the conclusion is inescapable. You, madam, are a fraud."

He had the satisfaction of seeing her turn purple. "_What_ do you mean by that?"

"Who cares what he means by that?" Dhawan asked. "He's trying to get your goat, Professor. I wouldn't fall for it if I were you."

"No, I want to hear how he could _possibly_ back up an outrageous allegation like that. Well, boy?"

"Oh, in your younger days I don't dispute you were a credible scientist. Nothing particularly spectacular, but certainly you showed promise. But then you went home... I can't imagine why; perhaps the notion of being imprisoned in your own home, nude, and subject to the whims of the men who all but own you sends a masochistic thrill up your little spine... regardless of _why_ you did it, you went home, and you have produced since then... what? Computer, display list of papers of Professor Yalit since 2309."

The computer obliged. "Take a good look at that," Q invited the gathering maliciously. "Compare that listing to anything you yourselves have done, and ask yourself, 'Why has someone with fewer papers to her name than my grad students been invited to a conference that _I_ was told was for the elite among physicists?'"

"You don't have any of my inventions up there!" Yalit shouted. "That only reflects a small fraction of what I've done."

"Ah yes. Your inventions." Q's smile grew broader. "Well, you're quite the little inventor, Yalit, no one argues that. But I hardly think it's fair that someone who's spent her life channeling whatever talent she may have into the pursuit of profit, through inventions she's marketed through her sons-- and charged typical Ferengi flesh-gouging prices for them, I might add-- and contributed almost nothing to the free exchange of ideas amongst sentient races in the galaxy, should be considered an equal with people who have spent most of _their_ lives and careers freely sharing information for the betterment of all. You have to ask yourself-- what _is_ Yalit doing here? Is this a sop to the Ferengi government, or some such?"

"That is distinctly unlikely," one of the Vulcans said. "Since Ferengi women are forbidden by law to leave Ferenginar or its colonies, it is doubtful that the Ferengi government is aware of Yalit's presence here."

"Oh, they know about me," Yalit said sharply. "None of them will dare lift a finger. I know things about Grand Nagus Zek that'll keep the auditors _far_ away from me." She turned to Q. "You make it sound as if making a profit is a bad thing," she said accusingly.

"Dear lady, it _is_," Q said smugly. "This is not Ferenginar, you know. The ideals of Federation science state that knowledge should be shared, and that science progresses most quickly when it is. Isn't it a Cardassian ideal to share scientific knowledge so long as that sharing does not conflict with the State?" he asked Tamal suddenly, turning toward her. She nodded. Oh, this was wonderful. "And don't many Bajoran sects now believe that the Prophets granted the Bajorans with the intelligence to understand the universe around them, and that scientific pursuits are a form of worship to be freely shared?" he asked Malo.

"What does that have to do with anything?" Yalit asked belligerently.

"Is there any point to this?" Dhawan asked. "Some of us--"

Q interrupted Dhawan, ignoring her completely. "What that has to do with is your right to be here, to say anything at this conference, to be taken seriously as a scientist by your peers," Q said, spinning back to Yalit. "You are nothing but a businesswoman, a greedy, grasping creature who uses her skills of intellect for personal profit and not scientific knowledge at all. So what are you doing here? What _right_ have you to be here?"

"I was invited! What right have you to be here? Don't say _you've_ never made a profit off your knowledge-- _you_ managed to buy an entire starbase by selling your skills to the Federation, so who are you to talk to me about rights?"

Q raised an eyebrow. "My dear woman, I do think you're getting overemotional. At your age, shouldn't you be careful of your heart?"

"You know I'm right! You know you have no right to insult me for trying to make a profit off my work!"

"Well, I suppose it would be excessively rude of me to insult you for selling your body at the Makropyrios for spare change," Q drawled. "But--"

"That's enough!" Dhawan shouted. "Q, Yalit, _shut up!_"

"Certainly," Q said pleasantly, and sat back in his chair, enjoying the reactions he was getting, the expressions the scientists were mostly trying to hide. In his early days as a human, he had learned that one thing almost all academics in the Federation held anathema was the notion of working in business, where the need to keep trade secrets prevented the free exchange of ideas. Brilliant scientists like Noonian Soong were routinely labeled as nutcases if they kept their work to themselves-- a vicious cycle, since it made those scientists paranoid and even more unwilling to share their work, but then, Q never said it was a logical practice. For Yalit, trying to make a profit off her work was probably second nature-- she _was_ a Ferengi, even if she was a woman. But for Federation academics, someone who did all her work for the business sector and shared very little of it through peer review was not an academic, and though they wouldn't openly admit to the prejudice, they definitely considered such people lesser than they themselves.

He had just destroyed Yalit's reputation. The casual revelation that she'd been a prostitute-- something the Ferengi saw nothing wrong with as long as you were good at it, but that would strike these academics with some degree of revulsion-- was merely icing on the cake; the damage was done. And it felt good.

"If you're done with the histrionics on a subject no one cares about, Lucy, can we get back to the topic at hand?" Markow asked dryly.

Q even felt better about Markow. Perhaps his own reputation had been damaged by what Markow had done, but that was nothing to the damage he could do to other people's if they dared question him, as he'd just done to Yalit. "Go right ahead," he replied, waving his hand expansively.

* * *

This whole trip was in some ways proving to be a burden on T'Laren.

The issue of Tris and Sovaz' presence was one thing, of course, but that wasn't the truly burdensome thing. And Q himself was not the problem-- she expected him to be difficult. But when he wasn't with her, which was a good portion of the time, she was bored.

Oh, she could read, or exercise-- she had begun taking a Security training class in bodyguarding, since she was still certain that Q would do better if it were just him and her, without the added complication of a hired bodyguard or any other additional personnel, and that was something to do. But it didn't take up a majority of her time without Q. T'Laren was a fairly social being, and being in a place where her only friends were her patient, her ex-lover and possibly her former sister-in-law was taking its toll. When she had been in Starfleet, there had always been friends to converse with, patients to see, paperwork to do. Being alone on a starship, with nothing to do but work with Q and nothing to do at all when he was doing his own work, was leaving her far too much time to think about other things, like how utterly she'd ruined her life since the last time she'd been on a starship.

She refused to think about that. So T'Laren spent a fair degree of time meditating and a fair degree of time wandering aimlessly through the areas of the ship that civilians had authorized access to. This naturally meant she spent a good deal of time in Ten-Forward, chatting with total strangers and soaking up the starship ambiance. She had missed Starfleet more than she'd realized, and being here and not belonging was painful.

Today when she wandered into Ten-Forward, right about the time for late lunches, she felt a subliminal sense of discomfort immediately. Slowly, pretending there was nothing wrong, she scanned the room, her eyes roving over all the patrons... and finally alighted on the source of the problem. Sovaz and four other Vulcans were sitting near the window, discussing physics animatedly. T'Laren turned and started to walk back out, without acknowledging them.

One of them called, a voice pitched to carry over the crowd's noise only if one had Vulcan ears. "Dr. T'Laren! Join us?"

At this point it would be terribly ungracious to refuse. Not quite sighing, T'Laren walked over to the table. "You wished to speak to me, Doctor?" she asked neutrally.

"As we are all possessed of doctorates here, perhaps we should exchange names. I'm T'Para. This is Stamor, and Soltan, and Toral, and of course you are acquainted with Sovaz," the woman said. "You are welcome to join us, if you wish." Her tone of voice was one that humans would have found blandly unrevealing, but that T'Laren recognized as friendliness. "It can be difficult to be isolated from one's own people for a significant length of time."

"Your offer is gracious," T'Laren said. "But I've learned from talking to Q that my ability to follow a discussion of physics is very limited."

"We're discussing Federation politics, however, so I'm sure you would have as much to contribute as any of us," the woman persisted.

The others at the table were literally unreadable-- even T'Laren couldn't tell if they were made uncomfortable by the physicist's forwardness, or if they genuinely wanted T'Laren to join them. They were probably curious, she thought, forcing down anger-- a Vulcan clinical xenopsychologist was as rare to Vulcans as to anyone else, and they probably wondered how badly her discipline would have to be impaired in order to want to be in her profession, let alone succeed at it. "Regretfully I must decline," T'Laren said. "I've lived in a certain amount of isolation for the past several months, and have very little knowledge of current Federation politics."

"Indeed?" Soltan raised an eyebrow. "We are undoubtedly ill-informed compared to many, so this isolation may not be a difficulty. Have you been working with Q all this time?"

The question was, for a Vulcan, slightly rude-- but forgivable in an ivory tower academic, whose social skills were not his area of specialty. Sovaz was hardly the only socially inept Vulcan scientist, though she was a rather extreme example. "I have been concerned with my own recovery for considerable time," T'Laren replied evenly. "Undoubtedly Sovaz has told you I suffered from mental unrest for some time. I have been engaged in study and meditation to restore my equilibrium." That would shut them up. No Vulcan would pry into the details of another Vulcan's mental illness, or a retreat to recover mental health. And it was not a lie. There was no better way to describe the months she'd spent with Lhoviri.

"Your pardon. No offense was intended."

"I would certainly not take any. Has the conference taken a recess for lunch? I would wonder where Q is."

"We called a recess," Sovaz said. "Nothing productive was getting done-- Q and Dr. Yalit were calling each other names, and various other people were taking sides. It was really incredibly disruptive."

T'Laren's heart sank. "What sort of names?"

"In essence, he called her a Ferengi," T'Para said dryly. "Are the details necessary?"

"This is exactly the sort of thing I'm working with him to stop. A bit more detail would be of use."

"He claimed that she had no business at the conference, because she had spent most of her research on profit-making instead of the disinterested pursuit of knowledge," T'Para said. "He then added that she had supported herself through prostitution while at the Makropyrios, an assertion whose factual basis is suspect at best."

"Actually, that's entirely in keeping with what we know of Ferengi society," Sovaz said. "I spoke to a Ferengi at length once, and he implied that among his people, the exchange of female sexual services for money is the norm."

"Yes, it's highly unlikely Yalit would consider that demeaning, so long as she was highly paid," Soltan said.

"Where is he now?" T'Laren asked.

"In theory, he and Dr. Markow were going to have a discussion over lunch," Toral said. "In practice, since he was still arguing with Yalit when we left, it's difficult to tell where he might be at the moment."

"I'll locate him," T'Laren replied. "My thanks for your assistance."

* * *

In fact, she didn't locate Q at the conference, as she'd planned. He had, apparently, finally taken off for lunch break. Not that she could have done much, aside from attempt to break up any ongoing arguments-- it wasn't as if she could take Q aside and chew him out in public. She would have to wait until after the conference for that.

Q showed up around 2000 hours, seeming obscenely cheerful-- probably because he had gotten to tear someone apart today, T'Laren thought, annoyed. How did he expect to ever make positive connections with people when he spent all his time in groundless personal attacks? "What happened between you and Dr. Yalit today?" she asked.

Q looked startled. "What, have you got a network of spies?"

"The Vulcan contingent of the conference apparently decided that there were far more productive things that could be done with their time than to listen to you and Yalit argue, and went to lunch. I met them in Ten Forward, and they told me how you were spending your time."

Q shrugged. "I was engaged in a power struggle." He smiled ferally. "I won."

"A power struggle? Exactly what sort of power are we talking about?"

"The power to be taken seriously by our fellows, what else?" Q flopped down on one of the chairs. "She impugned the accuracy of my work in general, so I pointed out that she really had no business being here, given that she'd spent all her energies on profit-making and little on science."

"And that she was a prostitute at the Makropyrios?" T'Laren asked dryly.

"Oh, that was beautiful. I couldn't have _invented_ something more perfectly designed to play to the parochial prejudices of ivory tower academics. They might have forgiven her for spending all her time on her family business and her inventions-- one expects that of Ferengi-- but they'll never forgive her for whoring."

"Why not? Isn't that also expected of Ferengi?"

"Of _female_ Ferengi. Who are considered to be fairly mindless. I don't know about the humans you say still engage in the profession-- I'm sure they aren't doing it to put themselves through the Makropyrios-- but nearly every developed race in this quadrant perceives an inverse relationship between the willingness of a being to sell their nether regions and the value of their minds. Prostitution is just not something a scientist _does_. Maybe a businesswoman could be forgiven, but not a scientist, who's not supposed to be a slave to the profit motive in the first place." He grinned more widely. "Then, after Markow managed to get the meeting back on track, she accused _me_ of being obsessed with sex because I was too ugly to get a woman. I hadn't said a thing to provoke her in twenty minutes-- it looked like she was so insecure she had to restart a childish argument just because she hadn't had the last word, _and_ I'm so much better looking than a Ferengi that she essentially shot herself in the foot. I mean, even _Klingons_ prefer humans to Ferengi-- they think we're milquetoasts, but Ferengi are pond scum, or something. It was wonderful. She totally destroyed herself."

"Wonderful?" T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "One might wonder about your priorities."

"My priorities are protecting myself, T'Laren." He looked at her, hard. "You don't get it, do you? She was trying to undercut my authority. I told you this morning-- without my authority, I'm dead."

"And I told _you_ the Federation will hardly throw you out for one failure."

"No, I agree. They won't. But if my reputation is damaged amongst the top Federation physicists-- some of these people advise the ones who pay for my upkeep, you know, and if they decide that all of my work needs to be audited for accuracy-- do you have any idea how much effort that would take? And how badly it would damage the Federation's confidence in me? My work is the one area where my reputation is unassailable-- I may be considered a social cripple, a coward, and a weakling, obnoxious, arrogant and self-centered, but I'm also as close to omniscient as a human gets. If people's confidence in that is shaken, I don't _have_ much else." His expression had grown darker as he spoke, almost accusatory, as if any opposing opinion from T'Laren was a declaration that he should lose what little power he had. "I'll do what it takes to protect that, and enjoy myself doing it. I'm sure warrior races get a big thrill out of beating on each other to protect their positions-- well, _I_ evolved for verbal combat, and I'm remarkably talented at it, if I do say so myself. Now, not only will Yalit likely keep her mouth shut, but LeBeau and Christian and Morakh and all the other people who like to make cheap shots at me will likely think twice before taking me on."

"Or they'll attack you physically. Q, don't you realize that nobody else but you thinks that verbal combat is the ultimate form of self-protection? Since you defeated them so thoroughly there, they'll find some other arena to assail you on. Perhaps Yalit can't physically attack you, but what would you do if she accused you of attacking her?"

"Explain that she's a liar, of course."

"She's an old woman, and very small. And she's also quite wealthy, and must have considerable connections on her homeworld. Despite your opinion of Ferengi, they are perfectly capable of deviousness. And money and deviousness is a dangerous combination."

Q waved a hand dismissively. "Yalit won't dare come after me. She knows what I can do, now."

"What _can_ you do, aside from damage her reputation?"

"Well, that's enough, for a scientist."

"But as you yourself pointed out, Yalit is as much a businesswoman as a scientist. And at her age, she may feel that her reputation is well enough established to be unassailable... or that you may be able to damage her reputation beyond repair, and that she must strike to prevent you from doing that. A woman who's succeeded in becoming a physicist, despite not being legally permitted to wear clothes, handle money or learn to read, is by definition a formidable individual. You have never encountered the kind of obstacles Yalit must have, and you have no way of knowing how those obstacles must have shaped her."

"What can she do, hire assassins to try to kill me?" He grinned sardonically. "Like that hasn't been tried before. I doubt anything Yalit could throw at me would be any more successful than attacks planned by far more advanced races."

"I wasn't actually expecting anything so melodramatic... but it _could_ come to that."

"I'm not awfully concerned with it."

"You should be," T'Laren said sharply. "You're concerned with protecting yourself, but the only arena you can see is that of verbal interaction and status struggles. Q, among many humanoid races, bright, witty clever children still end up being beaten up by the far less intelligent classroom bully. When you demonstrate to people that they can't beat you on your terms, they'll shift to another playing field, one where you're far weaker. It makes far more sense to avoid making enemies in the first place."

"And so I should turn the other cheek, is that it? That's essentially the best way to get smacked around, you know. I don't believe in turning a blind eye when people are attacking me--"

"I'm not arguing that you should. I'm saying that you should avoid needlessly antagonizing people. You made Yalit into an enemy by attacking her when she first came aboard. It's hardly unreasonable that she would seek to humiliate you in return. Of the others you mention, Dr. Christian-- she's the one whose son was on the _Enterprise_ when you sent it against the Borg, isn't she?"

"Yes."

"I think she's the only of your enemies at this conference that you could not have avoided making. None of the others are put off by things you did as a Q-- they're all concerned with things you did relatively recently, to them personally. _You_ made them into enemies. And now you may justify protecting yourself all you wish, but you cannot overlook the fact that you caused them to attack you in the first place-- and if you retaliate every time they do, it is likely to spiral downwards and eventually develop into an enmity intense enough to be dangerous. You've already learned what can happen, with LeBeau. Do you particularly want to be slapped in the face again?"

"If she tries, I'll press charges."

"What if Yalit slapped you? No one would take that seriously enough to _let_ you press charges, given her size."

"Oh, I could probably nail her on some obscure Ferengi law that says that if a woman hits a man her male relatives have to pay him a hefty fine, or something."

"That's not the point." She looked at him carefully. "Is any of this getting through?"

Q shrugged. "I won't go out of my way to make enemies, but I'm not here to win friends. I'm here to entertain myself. It's hardly my fault that people like Yalit insist on being so entertaining."

"I begin to think you're a lost cause," T'Laren murmured. "Do what you like-- I can't stop you. But there _will_ be consequences, and those consequences may be more than you can handle."

"I deal with people trying to kill me on a regular basis. I'd say there isn't much I can't handle." He yawned ostentatiously. "Now, considering that I got about three hours of sleep last night due to your interference, and I've had a very strenuous day, _I_ am going to crash. I'm sure we can continue this silly argument at some other point."

"A wise idea," T'Laren said. He'd proven his ability to go ridiculous hours without sleep during the Borg threat, but she was sure he shouldn't overtax himself when he was recovering from being at death's door less than two months ago.

* * *

T'Laren stayed out in the main room, reading, even though she could just as easily have gone to her own bedroom. One of the things she tried to do when she had enough rooms to make it workable was to reserve her bedroom for sleep and meditation as exclusively as possible.

It was close to two hours later when the door chimed. Startled, T'Laren went to the door. Who would be coming here at 2200 hours?

One of the Vulcans from the conference-- Stamor, the extremely quiet man she'd met today-- was standing there. "I regret to say Q has retired for the night," T'Laren said.

"He is not the only one here I wished to talk to," Stamor said. "May I come in?"

"Why did you wish to speak to me?"

"It concerns Sovaz."

Reluctantly she stepped back to let him in. "What is your concern with Sovaz?"

"You are her older sister, isn't that correct?"

The irritation at having to deal with a fellow Vulcan at all came out in her voice just a bit more than she wished. "I was married to Sovaz's elder brother by blood. However, we are divorced." The term in Vulcan actually meant "severed", with all the accompanying connotations of a broken social contract and the remains of family ties, like bleeding severed limbs. There would be no need to explain to a fellow Vulcan the discomfort of the situation.

"I see-- but you are nevertheless the closest she has to a female relative, here." He took a calming breath-- not an overt one like a human would, but T'Laren could tell. "I am interested in the possibility of bonding with her."

T'Laren's knee-jerk reaction was that Sovaz was far too young for that. But she _was_ 27-- old enough to make a choice based on logic, too young still for hormones to cloud any bit of her decision. Most Vulcans were bonded by their parents, at the age of seven, for reasons suiting the parents' purposes. Since Vulcan's greater involvement with the Federation and the outside races, many Vulcans had rebelled against the notion of entering the most important lifetime contract they would ever make at the age of seven and the bidding of parents, without any of their own interests factored into the decision. However, it was still considered wisest to bond before the hormonal changes that brought increased interest in sex, bonding and reproduction-- Vulcans could indeed feel physical desire, and a young person just beginning to experience that transformation would not be experienced enough with such desires to filter them out as well as other, more familiar desires could be. And for obvious reasons, a man could not wait very long after the changes began before he needed to be bonded. So it was a popular custom for unbonded Vulcans to bond at Sovaz's age, when they were mature enough mentally to make a logical decision based on their own interests and not their parents', and would not yet have to make the effort of factoring sexual desire out of their decision-making process. This was the ideal age for Sovaz to bond, and by tradition, the person seeking the liaison had to discuss it with a female relative of the person they sought before they could pursue the hand.

"I see." T'Laren took a calming breath of her own. "Well, it _is_ a propitious age. Might I ask how old you are?"

"I am 34, so you see that my concern is urgent," Stamor said. "I have put off my time with the new drugs and meditation, but I sense that their effectiveness is drawing to an end."

That seemed a little odd, for a man to baldly admit that to a woman he had just met, and an unbonded woman at that. Even Sovaz and Soram's parents hadn't been _that_ liberal. But then, T'Laren had never played the role of the _ba'shel_, the female advisor to a suitor, before, so perhaps it was common in that position.

"Why Sovaz? She is not fully ripened yet. For a man in your position, wouldn't it be better to take a wife who had ripened already?" A woman who had fully undergone Vulcan puberty, and was sexually mature before her husband's first pon farr, was far more likely to be able to share the pon farr with him-- which was considered a mixed blessing at best, as sharing pon farr spared the woman the pain her husband's brutal need would otherwise cause, at the cost of making her share that maddening need and irrationality. A woman who hadn't fully ripened-- whose physical body was sexually mature but whose brain was not yet producing the hormones that governed the fertility cycle-- might not be able to share a pon farr with her husband, and this was not considered desirable, as it was supposed to be entirely up to the woman what she chose to do. Of course, a woman would factor that into account before choosing to bond with a man if she thought he would enter pon farr before she ripened.

"Your position has merit, but I... I have searched long for a woman who would be my intellectual equal. It is difficult to find an unbonded woman in the sciences who shows such promise already. Sovaz is not as knowledgeable as one who had studied only the sciences and never entered Starfleet, but her breadth of knowledge allows her to show a talent for synthesis that would be very valuable."

T'Laren nodded. "Her family is highly intelligent. Her brother Soram is a well-respected engineer in Starfleet whose designs have been incorporated into several of Starfleet's newest engines; her mother T'Rafi is a philosopher, and her father Sodar is a professor of political science at the Vulcan Academy of Science."

Stamor nodded eagerly. "So genetically it would be a good match. I myself come from a lowlier pedigree, but I believe my personal record as a scientist speaks for itself. In addition, Sovaz is a Starfleet officer, and I believe Vulcan's future will come from its interaction with the Federation. A Starfleet officer for a mother would prepare my children for a universe where interaction with other cultures will become more and more important. And in terms of personality, our interests are similar and I believe we would be compatible."

He did not add that he was sexually attracted to Sovaz, but if he was as old as he said he was, and not a hybrid, that had to be taking increasing importance in his life. Hybrids with most species, including humans, entered pon farr late, despite the fact that humans themselves matured sexually far earlier than Vulcans did. An ordinary male Vulcan, however, entered his first pon farr around age 28-30. To put it off to 34 with drugs and meditation meant one would be suffering from the effects of an active, heightened libido signaling that one had ripened for years before that libido settled down into the seven-year cycle of pon farr. It would be almost as bad as a human adolescence.

T'Laren nodded. "Your reasons seem logical. I will consult with Sovaz as to whether she desires a suit, and we can make arrangements from there."

* * *

Despite feeling better about what had happened today, Q was still plagued by nightmares. In his dreams, the other scientists turned on him, declaring that Yalit and LeBeau were right, and nothing he said could be trusted... and he couldn't convince them otherwise. Picard was there, saying, "I knew we shouldn't give him a chance. We were entirely too kind." Anderson was nodding, saying, "If we're not getting sufficient return on our investment, I guess we'll have to boot him out." And then he was, of all places, in a classroom, drawn from images from his study of Earth history and his exploration of Jean-Luc Picard's mind as well as the conference here and places he had been before he'd ever heard of Earth.

An old mentor stood in front of him, looking like Commodore Anderson and dressed like a 19th-century Terran schoolmarm, complete with ruler. Since Q's human brain could no longer quite process the nonhuman senses the Q used to identify each other, his dreams tended to turn all his former people into mortals he knew now, but he always knew in the dream who they were supposed to be. "What have I told you about linear thinking?" She rapped his hands with the ruler.

"It's not my fault!" Q protested. "You people made me a mortal! How can I help it?"

"You're still supposed to be better than that. _Think!_ How can something exist if it can't exist in nature?"

And then he woke up, heart pounding, both from the fear the dream had evoked and the sudden revelation it had granted him.

_How can something exist if it can't exist in nature?_

Answer: Someone had created it artificially.

He stumbled to the bathroom and splashed water on his face. "Computer, open connection to Lt. Sovaz."

There was a delay of a few seconds. "Sovaz here," the girl's voice came, sounding a little less perky than usual.

"Sovaz, this is Q. Listen, if I wanted to get time-series astronomical data on the anomaly, dating back, oh, say a few hundred years or so, what observatories would I need to contact?"

"The only data you'd be able to get would be what's available in the real-time spectrum," Sovaz said, sounding puzzled. "If you need that data I can get it for you, but it will be limited."

"That's fine. If what I suspect is true, visible light and its relations will be all I need."

"What do you suspect?" A bit of the perkiness was back.

"I suspect the anomaly hasn't been around as long as it thinks it has. What's our range?"

"Federation space covers 310.3 light years, and we have reciprocal scientific agreements with the Klingons and several non-aligned races, which extends our range by an additional 93 light-years. From here, we can get about 250 light years' worth of data, more if there happen to be exploration ships out beyond the border of Federation space. In addition, there is a scientific outpost in the Gamma Quadrant, but I'm not sure their telescopes can perceive the anomaly at all."

"Let's get the 250 years, then, and we'll only try the Gamma Quadrant if we absolutely must."

"I'll meet you at your quarters, if that's agreeable to you. There may be other queries you need me for."

Q grinned. Just this once, he'd let the girl play the role of teenage sidekick.

T'Laren was out in the main room reading, which surprised Q, given the hour. Though actually it wasn't _that_ late, only 0120 hours; he'd gone to bed earlier than he usually did. Even better-- Sovaz' presence always discomfited T'Laren, and after her totally unwarranted attack on him earlier, Q would enjoy seeing that. He went to the door just as it rang, and pressed the button to open it.

That got T'Laren's attention. She looked up. "Sovaz? Why are you here so late?"

"Was I expected to arrive earlier?" Sovaz asked, in her best confused voice. "I came as quickly as possible."

"No, I was wondering why you are intruding on Q at this hour."

"Because I invited her, T'Laren dearest," Q said, patiently, as if speaking to an idiot child. "How's my data doing?"

"I've sent queries to ten observatories and starships in the line of sight, one approximately every 25 light-years, with an alpha priority. The closest data should be coming in within five minutes; the rest will take a bit longer depending on how many subspace relay stations the query needs to go through and how far apart those relay stations are."

All sciences had been revolutionized by faster-than-light travel, for every species that discovered it, as warp drive or its equivalent permitted alien races to speak to and learn from one another, but physics and astronomy had gained an even larger boon. Faster-than-light communications and travel allowed one to get astronomical data over time periods by allowing one to outrun the light coming from a star one hundred, two hundred years ago, and observe it as if one were looking through a time machine. Of course, the only data that was available that way was realspace data-- subspace data couldn't be outrun with a warp drive-- but the ancients, limited to their own planets and to realspace data, had developed all sorts of wonderful techniques for learning things about the universe based on only the electromagnetic radiation that reached their planet.

"Sovaz, I must speak with you briefly," T'Laren said.

"I have a small amount of time," Sovaz replied.

"Have you considered bonding yet?"

"No, why?"

"I have been approached as _ba'shel_ by a man who seeks to bond with you. Are you amenable to such a thing?"

Q tapped his foot ostentatiously. Did they need to discuss their silly reproductive rituals right now?

Sovaz cocked her head slightly, then made a slight shrug-- the Vulcan equivalent of one of Q's dismissive waves. "Talk to my parents. If they concur that it's a good match, I'll pursue it. Right now I haven't time to concern myself with such things."

"Haven't time? Sovaz, the decision to bond, and who to bond with, is the most important decision you'll make in your life. You owe it a bit more than 'Let my parents make the decision for me, I haven't time.'"

"Why? That is exactly how most people do it. You wouldn't expect me to concern myself with the question if I had been bonded in childhood, so why do you expect me to concern myself with it simply because I was not?"

"Because the whole point to not bonding you in childhood was to let you make that decision as an adult."

"T'Laren, we _do_ have some work to get done here," Q pointed out, "so if you'd just go away and leave Sovaz alone like a good little Vulcan..."

"Talk to my parents. If they agree the match would be good, I will consider the decision for myself. I don't see why I should concern myself with a match they don't approve of, though, so I don't need to concern myself until they've screened him." She turned back to Q. "What other data will we need?"

Just for a moment, he was tempted to needle her, or T'Laren, or both, about the conversation they'd just had-- mortal preoccupation with reproduction really _was_ very amusing-- but he was on fire with his idea and he really didn't feel like wasting the time. "Let's assemble everything we've already got and take a look at it."

T'Laren looked at the two of them. "Q, are you aware of what time it is?"

"I can read a clock just as well as you, T'Laren. Inspiration waits for no man. Now go away and stop bothering me."

She turned and went to her room without a word. "Well. That worked rather well," Q murmured to no one in particular, surprised she was being so docile about it.

* * *

By morning, after five cups of quadruple-strength coffee, Q had it. He had enough data to prove that the anomaly was artificially created, and had a few plans for assembling the data he'd need to prove out his gut feeling about why it had been created. Sovaz, unlike T'Laren after the all-night session assembling clothing for his trial, seemed untouched by her lack of sleep-- the advantages of youth and proper Vulcan discipline, he assumed. Or possibly she found listening to Q talk out loud about his theories and helping him gather the data he needed inherently more stimulating than T'Laren had found clothes-hunting.

He chased her off two hours before the conference began so he could get dressed. Functioning on three hours of sleep and five cups of coffee was not unheard-of for Q, but he was weaker nowadays and showed it more. He needed plenty of time to put on makeup so nothing of the dark circles under his eyes would show. And he thought one of his more elaborate outfits was called for, which would require extra dressing time.

This time he waited the requisite fifteen minutes or so to show up fashionably late, and swept in dramatically while Sovaz was still reading the minutes from yesterday. "Oh, do leave off on that tedious nonsense, Sovaz," he interrupted.

She looked up at him. "It's standard procedure to read the minutes before opening the floor."

"Does anybody here really _need_ to hear all the tedious little things we went over yesterday?"

Yalit said, "Why, are you afraid the record will show what a childish coward you are?"

"How interesting. A Ferengi calling someone a coward. Any minute now I expect Dr. Morakh to call me too violent, or something."

"Q, shut up," Dhawan said tiredly. "Nobody wants a repeat of your behavior yesterday."

"Good, then I don't see why Sovaz should waste all our time repeating it. After a day to think about Dr. Markow's results, I do believe I have a theory that accounts for _all_ the observed data." He smiled insouciantly, and leaned forward, resting his hands on the table as he stood, hovering over Dhawan and Sovaz. "Of course, if you, Commander, feel absolutely certain that we cannot proceed without a detailed rehash of yesterday's business, why of course I'll bow to your wisdom."

Soltan said, "I've never understood why it is necessary to waste time by listing what transpired yesterday. We're all intelligent beings; surely we can remember yesterday reasonably well."

"Not all of us are Vulcans," one of the humans said sourly.

"Read the damn minutes or don't," Markow said. "We're wasting more time discussing it."

Sovaz picked up where she'd left off, exactly as if there had been no interruption. Q sank regally into a chair, waiting for his moment. The one failing the child had, he decided, was that she was entirely too Starfleet-- tied to her rules and regulations. Otherwise, she was almost as interesting as T'Laren.

As soon as Sovaz was done, she turned to Q. "I believe Q has a new hypothesis to present to us," she said.

"You're entirely too gracious, my dear." Q stood up. "In fact, Sovaz was of invaluable assistance in gathering the data for this. As her tedious adherence to Robert's Rules of Order should have reminded all of us, yesterday Dr. Markow proved that the anomaly we're studying contradicts the laws of physics."

"He proved no such thing," LeBeau said. "He proved _your_ theory was wrong."

"It's the exact same thing, my dear. If someone who had only studied Standard for a year told you-- presumably a native Standard speaker-- that he had discovered that 'cat' really meant a ferret, I'm sure you'd feel, with some justification, that your beliefs and knowledge were still correct. And if he managed to prove that cat meant ferret, you'd be certain there was a catch. Well, I've found the catch."

"Which is?" Markow asked.

"Consider this. The singularity shares almost all of the characteristics of what we in the Continuum describe as an Anomaly, yet it isn't one. No natural process has ever been observed, in all of the several-billion-year history of the Continuum, that could conceivably create such a singularity. This seems to imply to me that we are not dealing with a natural process at all. Computer! Display time series photographs-- time point 100 and time point 200."

The computer obediently displayed the images-- the area of the anomaly as photographed by high-powered telescopic scanners 100 and 200 light-years away, respectively. Q had the computer highlight the actual coordinates of the anomaly. In one picture, the one from 200 light-years away, there was a blue-white star, brightly shining, in the highlighted area. In the other picture, there was nothing. Graphs underneath displayed the refraction of various spectra surrounding the area of the anomaly; it was clear that a singularity was present in the picture where there was no star, and absent where there was.

"So the singularity didn't exist two hundred years ago?" someone said.

"Your ability to state the obvious is astonishing," Q said cheerily. "Which is very interesting. If you think about it, the fact that the anomaly reflects fourth, fifth and sixth-dimensional radiation _should_ imply that it exists in all temporal dimensions Federation science can identify. Or, to put it more simply, the singularity has always existed and will always exist. But clearly, it has not. Now, if you were in charge of security and you wanted to keep out time travelers, how would you do it?"

"What does that have to do with anything?" LeBeau asked.

"Could someone intelligent please answer the question?" Q said.

"You couldn't keep out a time traveler," Sovaz said. "Because if you created a barrier, they could always go back in time to before the barrier was created."

"Right. Now suppose you have the ability to project a barrier back in time, what happens?"

"The time traveler goes forward?"

"No, forward and backward. I misphrased myself."

"How could you do that?" Milarca asked. "If you existed in a timeline where the barrier _didn't_ always exist, then by projecting it back in time, you're changing the timeline. You would never have set out to create a barrier if one was already there."

"I knew a Romulan would get it," Q beamed. "Any other problems?"

Not to be outdone by a Romulan, Morakh growled, "If you created the barrier around yourself, you would have to have been born within it, otherwise you'd prevent yourself from ever having gotten in. And if you created it around something you wished to protect, you would prevent yourself from ever being able to get at that item."

"Very good! Obviously there's _some_ brain tissue in amongst all that bone." Q paced. "However, there is a way to bypass the paradox. We here at this point in time cannot project a form of energy, no matter how many dimensionalities it encompasses, that actually does not have any element of itself in this temporal dimension. So if your objective is to keep out time traveling _energy_\-- for instance, imagine that some people you don't like created a temporal transporter, and are going about beaming themselves into the past-- you can create a barrier which has sufficient resonances in the temporal dimensions that it would keep out energies which have any part of their waveform tied to this time. If a time traveler goes back in time, _everything they do_ has resonances in the fifth and sixth dimensions which are tied to their original time period. Milarca should know all about that." He grinned.

Milarca smiled tightly. "My mother was a defector, remember? I don't know any more about Romulan physics than you do."

"The Romulans have a more advanced understanding of time than we do?" Dhawan said.

"The Romulans use quantum singularities in their warp cores. You figure it out." He called up several equations on the holodisplay. "I don't expect you to be able to follow these intuitively, but I think if you study them, you'll see how they apply to the time travel situations your Federation has experienced... at least the ones your government hasn't classified. This should demonstrate why it is that the actions of a time traveler have resonance in their origin time, and these should show how it could be that one could deflect temporal energies while being tied to linear time oneself."

"You expect us to just take your word for it again?" Yalit snapped.

"No, my dear little troll, I expect you to do your homework. I just _said_ if you study these, you'll find that I'm right. Of course, I can imagine why you'd be adverse to some extra study-- probably too challenging for your ossified brain, and if there's no profit in it why exert yourself, right?"

"Q..." Dhawan said warningly.

"Commander..." Q returned, mocking her tone of voice. Then he returned to seriousness. "Now, I think _this_ equation should accurately describe the behavior of the singularity we're seeing. As you can see, a force field generated with these parameters would absorb lower-order energies, and deflect energies up to about sixth-dimensional waveforms. At higher levels of dimensionality, the only thing it would block is psionic energy."

"How can you tell it would block psionic energy?" Tamal said, bewildered. "I didn't know the Federation had an equation for psionic energy."

"We don't," T'Para said.

"Don't be silly. This is the general equation for psionic energy," Q said, scrawling it quickly on his padd and interfacing it with the display so they could all see. "I'm sure the Laon'l have played about with that, haven't you?" He turned to Elejani Baíi.

"We have some familiarity with psionic energy, yes," she responded.

"Now, as you can see, psionic energy is the only form of energy-- well, all right, the only form of energy you know of, but just take it from me, it's the only form of energy period-- that's infinitely scalar. If you had sufficient power behind a psionic transmission, it could encompass an aleph-null order of dimensionalities."

"That's what you said about quuonic radiation," Markow said.

"Did I indeed?" Q grinned. "What does that mean to you, Daedalus?"

"Just show us the transformation, Lucy. Stop grandstanding."

Quickly Q demonstrated that quuonic radiation was merely an extraordinarily high-powered form of psionic radiation. "So what I said holds true. Quuonic radiation doesn't scale down-- at some arbitrary level you could start calling it mere psi. Likewise, at a certain level you could call psi omnipotence. By the structure of this barrier, I believe that no matter how much power you put into your psionic energy, it would be reflected; however, other forms of energy can get through depending on their strength and dimensionality. Kinetic energy should be able to pass through at any strength, and of course kinetic energy has a limited dimensionality to begin with; eighth-dim waveforms can get through _if_ they are not psionic in nature." He looked out over the conference with his most dramatic expression. "Someone built this barrier to keep out powerful time-traveling psis."

"You can't possibly say that," Malo objected. "You don't have anywhere near enough evidence to project the motives of the builders of such a thing. If it _is_ in fact artificial."

"Oh, it's artificial, all right. But no, you're right, I can't say that for sure. However, it _does_ seem like the most logical reason to build such a barrier."

Gan, the Tellarite, looked up at him. "You're screwing up your power requirements again, Q. Look at this." He displayed an equation which showed how much power it would require to cover an area the size of the anomaly with a force field constructed by Q's equation. "That's the full power output of an entire sun. No one but your people have that kind of power."

"Au contraire. There _are_ species with the ability to harness such power technologically. Why, I could probably do it if I felt like it and I wasn't sure you lowly creatures would abuse it."

"How would you do it?" Sovaz asked, interestedly.

"About the same way I think they did. Computer, display time points 173.037612 through 173.037623."

"That display is continuous," the computer informed him.

"Even better. Begin it, frozen."

An image of the blue-white star shining in a speckled starfield, set out by the highlighting around it, appeared. "We were enormously lucky in that a science vessel-- Sovaz, what was it called again?"

"The _Alethea_," Sovaz supplied.

"Right, the _Alethea_ happened to be in the vicinity to take these after I narrowed the change down between time points 160 and 180-- that's 160 and 180 years ago, by the way. Just a little jaunt at warp nine got these wonderful folks into position to capture the actual change, as it occurred. Watch this. Computer, resume display, sped by factor of fifteen."

The image blossomed into life, the stars not moving at all, the computers having compensated for the fact that _Alethea_ had been moving when this was taken. Only the time indicator at the bottom moved.

Suddenly the star in question exploded. The image and the indicators at the bottom both clearly showed this to be a mere nova, without anywhere near the energy output to be a supernova. "Wait a minute!" someone protested. "A star that size should have gone super!"

"Keep watching," Q suggested.

The nova spread some distance, then attenuated into nothingness. A tiny, brilliant burst of light sparked into existence where it had been, and shone as brightly as the star had.

"A stellar core?..." someone murmured.

"Look at the readouts," Dhawan said tightly. "That thing's a pinpoint quasar!"

"Very good, Commander," Q said, a little of his usual insouciant cheer gone from his voice. The events transpiring on the display had the power to subdue even him.

The quasar grew a bit larger-- and then vanished, as did the remains of the nova. It took several seconds more for everyone to realize they had just witnessed the birth of the anomaly.

"All that," Q announced, "happened in under ten hours."

"You're joking," Roth said weakly.

"My God," Markow murmured.

"No joke. Impressive, isn't it? I have to tell you, people who can pull off a stunt like this impress even _me_, and I am _not_ easily impressed. Display off."

"What happened?" Elejani Baíi asked. "Can you explain what we just saw?"

"I think so. And this, Dr. Gan, is the answer to your riddle about the power supply." He paced. "I can't remember if you people are familiar with the quasar source or not."

"The quasar what?" someone asked.

"That answers that."

"There's a theory that quasars radiate from an extradimensional source-- a universe full of energy," Markow said. "Since there are no quasars in the Alpha Quadrant, it's been a little difficult to test."

"Yes, well this is something else you're going to have to take on faith. The theory is correct. The quasar source is actually a universe with negative entropy, which as you might guess means it is full to bursting with energy. It's quite plentiful-- we used it ourselves for a few million years on our way to forming the Continuum. _If_ you could punch a hole between this universe and the quasar source, you'd create a quasar-- a nearly eternal radiating body, putting out the kind of power you'd see ranging from a supernova to an entire galaxy, depending on the size of the quasar. Since the universe is expanding, rips in the fabric of space-time, like quasars, tend to grow, so quasars become more sizable over time, just like black holes. A species that can create and tap a quasar will have more power than they know what to do with. _But_ it takes enormous energy to rip such a hole. In fact, it takes the power of pretty much an entire sun. Sometimes a supernova will spontaneously create a quasar, and then, if the supernova does not also create a black hole which will devour the quasar's energies, you have a brand spanking new quasar, generally out in the middle of nowhere where space is thinner. Space is relatively thick here, which is why you see few wormholes and fewer quasars. In order to artificially create a quasar, you'd have to harness the power of a supernova.

"Someone pointed out that a star the size of that blue-white _should_ have supernovaed. And it did. But so much of the energies of it were taken up and channeled into the Quasar Construction Kit that what we saw barely looked like a run-of-the-mill nova, even. They took most of the energy of the supernova-- which they themselves probably caused; there's no indicator in our time series previous to the nova that that star was ready to die-- and punched a hole through space-time to the quasar source. Just a tiny hole, to create a tiny quasar. Then they used the quasar's own energies to enlarge the hole just a little bit, and as soon as it was big enough, they channeled _it_ into creating their force field. And that's how they built the anomaly."

"Who could do such a thing?" Elejani Baíi murmured. "They would be almost gods."

"Well, yes. We could have, clearly, but we wouldn't have bothered. If we'd wanted a quasar, any of us could have summoned enough energy to punch a hole into the quasar source ourselves. This was done by a lesser race than the Q. On the other hand, it's far beyond most humanoids _I've_ encountered. The Preservers couldn't have done it. The Iconians probably couldn't have, though they might have if they'd really worked on the problem. Possibly the Alphans or the Keiraines--"

"The Alphans?"

"I forget what their real name was. They were recently discovered-- the species that seeded this galaxy with humanoid life." In fact, Picard had been instrumental in the discovery-- one of the last things he'd done before he died, Q thought with a sudden wave of bitter grief. He forced it down. "A few others. For the most part, though, I'd put this in the purview of energy beings, who as a whole tend to be more advanced than you lowly matter-based creatures." He grinned.

"_Why_ would someone do such a thing?" Dhawan asked.

"Well, I told you my theory. I think they did it to keep out enormously powerful psis. I suspect they had some energy beings for enemies, which lends further credence to my idea that they were energy beings themselves. If the barrier is constructed as I think it is, it is totally and completely impervious to energy which contains a mind, which would make it an excellent defense against people who can beam themselves about the universe."

"Would it keep out the Q?"

"Yes, but I assure you, we never tormented any races powerful enough to build something like this. We believe in being on more-or-less friendly terms with our closest evolutionary neighbors."

"What would happen if a telepathic humanoid passed through the barrier? Would they die?" Sovaz asked.

"Well, in the first place, I'm not one hundred percent certain a humanoid _could_ get through the barrier. The barrier is impervious to electrochemical energy, remember. So while you _could_ pass through if you were in a shuttle coasting through-- on momentum, not impulse, as any engine power at all will be lost the moment you hit the barrier, and at any serious speed that will leave you a pancake, given that momentum is _not_ suppressed-- all the electrical activity in your brain and body would cease the moment you passed through. Would it start up spontaneously once you reached the other side? That's an excellent question."

"We could test it," Malo said. "Use clockwork to rig the ship to turn on its computers and engines after it's coasted through the barrier, and hardcode the computer's instructions so it doesn't lose them when the barrier negates energy. Give it a command to turn around and come back through the barrier. And send an animal through. If it comes back alive, send a person."

"The trouble is that we're dealing with a _singularity_," Dhawan said. "I don't care how anomalous it is, if something has to turn off its warp drive-- and its inertial dampeners-- once it's past the event horizon, it's going to go crunch. For all intents and purposes that thing is a black hole."

"It only looks that way," Q said. "Because it absorbs gravitic radition, it behaves on the _outside_ like a black hole. Past the event horizon, however, the fact that these effects are being caused by an artificial force barrier is going to make a significant difference. We should be able to angle a probe in such that it's in the plane of the gravity waves, and therefore isn't torn apart by tidal stresses. And the temporal effects of a black hole should be largely absent in this artificial creation, judging from the fact that it reflects temporal energies instead of absorbing them."

"Does that mean a person could do it?" Sovaz asked.

"If a person can get through at all, I suspect a telepathic person wouldn't have much trouble," Q said. "They might need to make the passage drugged to avoid pain, but they'd live through it, assuming a humanoid would live through it at all."

"Why don't we test it on you?" Yalit asked. "After all, if we test it on an animal we won't have any proof the process doesn't cause brain damage, or something."

"I think they should drum you out of the Ferengi Chamber of Commerce. Are you aware you just advocated risking one of the most valuable assets the Federation has for the sake of an experiment? Dear Yalit, perhaps we'll make a researcher out of you yet."

Yalit scowled. "You are not one of the most valuable assets the Federation has."

"Well, I suppose if you put my worth up against the gross planetary product of Earth, say, then no. You might want to look it up, though-- I think I'm worth a few small moons." He smiled cheerfully at her. "Which, I think, means that by your customs, you're supposed to be groveling to me. So go get me a coffee and keep your mouth shut, girlie."

Yalit's scowl deepened, but she kept her mouth shut, even though she made no move to get him the coffee. Which was fine with him, as he wouldn't have drunk a beverage she'd breathed on, anyway.

"Is there a way we can test the theory that the barrier blocks telepathic energies?" Dhawan asked.

"Yes," Q said. "Rig up a sufficiently powerful psionic amplifier and have a telepath project toward the barrier using it. They should experience the sensation of their mind being reflected back at them." At the looks he was getting, he sighed deeply. "Don't tell me. You people have never developed psionic amplification."

Elejani Baíi offered hesitantly, "We have occasionally used some such devices, but nothing of the order you're speaking of..."

"Actually," T'Para said slowly, "such devices existed in antiquity on Vulcan. Whatever information we might have held about them once might still be retained by the Kolinahru and the mind-healers. But I do not know if they would share such information."

"Hmm." Q touched his commbadge. "Q to T'Laren."

"T'Laren here."

"What do you know about psionic amplifiers?"

"I've used them before. On Bresel VII. My-- Our chief engineer and I were assigned to figure out how the devices worked, and it turned out they were psionic amplifiers. Why do you ask?"

Q smiled broadly. "Collect together all the information you can get about them, however obscure. You might also want Elejani Baíi's help in referencing Laon'l psionic amplifiers."

"Q, what is this about?"

"Advancing the cause of science," he said. "You up for it?"

"You know this is damned irregular," Dhawan said. "Dr. T'Laren's your therapist, not a specialist in this sort of thing."

"It sounds interesting," T'Laren said neutrally. "I'll see what I can do." She closed the link.

"T'Laren was also a Starfleet counselor for umpteen years," Q said. "I'm sure Sovaz knows all about her record. It's hardly like I'm asking some schmoe off the street to help us."

"T'Laren was a first contact expert, and often worked with my brother, who as Chief Engineer was responsible for the study of alien devices," Sovaz said.

"Why did a counselor work with the chief engineer?" Tamal asked, puzzled. "I thought your counselors were strictly psychologists."

"T'Laren and my brother were husband and wife. It's customary for Vulcan couples to work together on any projects that can admit both their talents," Sovaz said. "Apparently the study of alien devices fell under the purview of xenopsychology as well as engineering."

"Well," Dhawan said. "We've got our hypotheses, we've got plans to test them, so let's get moving."

* * *

T'Laren was actually quite intrigued by Q's offer. She _had_ been quite bored, and this would be something to do that sounded reasonably challenging, and suited to her talents.

In the days of Surak, psi had been much more unevenly distributed on Vulcan. Some Vulcans had been enormously powerful psis, possessing broadcast telepathy, and sometimes even telekinesis. Other Vulcans had possessed barely any psi at all, their families having been too poor to attract a valuable psi to interbreed with them. Even in those days, most Vulcan marriages had been arranged, based on genetic value and familial wealth and other things representing increased power for the family to receive them, rather than personality traits of the intended. There had also been a technology of psi in those days, devices like psionic amplifiers, dampeners, and the like.

When Lhoviri had brought T'Laren back in time to study under Surak himself, she had been largely too troubled and despairing to notice much of the culture at first. As time went by and she regained her emotional equilibrium, however, she had paid more attention. Since she hadn't been able to bring anything but knowledge out of the past with her, she had studied as much as she could get hold of on the now-lost arts, the devices Vulcan had rejected as interfering with the true purpose of psi, which was, according to Surakian doctrine, to aid the mind in centering itself and advancing in spiritual development, not to fight wars with. It was rather amazing that all the ancient species which possessed psi had at some point rejected psionic amplifiers. She asked Q if there was a reason for that.

"If a culture believed in initiating its young by putting them to death, how long do you think it would last?" Q asked, grinning at her.

"Do you mean that psionic amplifiers destroy a culture?"

"Hand an antimatter weapon to every joe on the street and see how long your culture lasts," Q said.

"But why? Cultures with far more advanced psionic abilities-- yours, for example-- survived. What's the difference between a psionic amplifier and having that level of psi oneself?"

"What's the difference between advanced training in the martial arts, and owning a phaser?"

"You're congenitally incapable of giving me a straight answer, aren't you?"

"If you're too stupid to work it out for yourself from my analogies, you really don't deserve to know."

Overall she preferred asking him about himself. At least then he would give her a straight answer sometimes. But she thought she knew what he meant. "You mean that to develop a certain level of mastery over psi without an amplifier, you need sufficient training and discipline that you won't misuse the powers?"

"Oh, you'll misuse them, all right. Every culture goes through a stage of misusing its powers. But generally what happens is that in a culture where the individuals learn to tap their own personal power, the individuals who do so successfully feel themselves removed from the concerns of those that can't. They have no real desire to use their psi to conquer the world or make sex slaves out of the populace or whatever other nonsense people who have artificial psi might do, because they think of themselves as more advanced. I mean, who wants to conquer a planet full of apes? Or whatever? They consider their equals to be the others who have advanced to their level, and while they might toy with the lesser beings, they'd do so on an occasional sporadic basis, like children tying cans to a dog's tail rather than conquerors enslaving a weaker population. And since most of the paths to higher development involve a kind of spirituality where the things of the physical are rejected anyway, many don't even abuse their powers in that way. Whereas if you simply _give_ some people psi, without them having to train it and advance spiritually for it, they end up going about tormenting people with it. In fact, you Vulcans seem to have done something much like that. When you bred for power, and had Vulcans with incredibly advanced gifts that they didn't have to work particularly hard for, you had psi wars. When you decided as a culture that you wanted everyone to have an about equal level of psi, you also got rid of the artificial amplifiers, and stopped abusing your psi. Mostly."

"Did anyone ever advance any significant degree with psionic amplifiers without destroying themselves?"

His eyes widened. "An interesting question." Q smiled, almost a death's head rictus. "One. A few billion years ago. They created devices which allowed the operator total control over reality."

"What happened to them? Did they destroy themselves?"

"Oh, no... well, in a manner of speaking, perhaps. Getting into a war with people who _don't_ require devices to do the very same thing is probably suicidally stupid, after all." He looked at the ceiling, and whistled an insouciant tune.

"You destroyed them."

"Whatever gave you that idea?" Q asked, still looking at the ceiling, his entire manner confirming what she'd just said. Then he grew serious and looked back at her. "When you advance to a certain degree, the idea of war seems utterly stupid. And therefore, truly advanced beings don't have wars. We'd only fight if we were threatened, and since everyone at our level is equally advanced and equally unlikely to start a fight, we don't ever engage in the sort of internecine tribal conflicts you mortals so love. But if one develops devices that mimic the abilities of highly advanced species, to the point where one can actually threaten those species without oneself having advanced beyond being warlike... well, let's say the combination is sufficiently unlovely that if we ever saw a species developing that level of technology again, we'd annihilate them before they had the brilliant idea of threatening us. And if we didn't, the Organians would. Or the Douwds. Or the Vash'ta. There's few enough of us that were around at the dawn of time that we all remember the lessons of the past quite well."

"In that case, is it truly wise to revive the technology of psionic amplification?" T'Laren frowned. "It seems as if that is definitely something that the Continuum might consider unwarranted intervention, at least."

"I'm not particularly worried about the Continuum. I plan to construct a psionic amplification device that works only for projecting telepathic perception, with baffles in it to prevent any more active use. I think the Federation is advanced enough to be entrusted with something that allows nothing more than the extension of telepathy, and in a fairly limited way."

"But what if someone gets hold of the technology and adapts it for other purposes? Baffles can be removed."

"They can be, but they won't be. I have no plans to let anyone else have access to the full design."

"What about the people who have to build it?"

"Piecemeal only. I discussed this with Commander Mariani. She seemed a little miffed that I didn't trust her precious engineers, but once I pointed out that the people who'd most like to get their grubby little paws on such a thing are telepaths, she was quite cooperative. Starfleet apparently has protocols for such things." He sighed, as if immensely put-upon. "Now, of course, I have to design the damned thing."

Over the next several days, T'Laren discovered that working with Q was a good way to develop empathy for everyone who wanted him dead. He was demanding, snide, condescending, and overbearing. T'Laren decided that this was an excellent learning experience, an opportunity to see Q as others saw him and therefore be able to help him deal with people more easily. She repeated this to herself as a calming mantra at least once an hour.

His behavior with the engineers was slightly better, but since they didn't know Q as well, they didn't take it nearly as well as T'Laren had. T'Laren was forced to run interference to prevent him from mortally offending them, and wasn't sure how successful she'd been. But within a few days, the psionic amplifier took shape.

"How are we supposed to test something only you have the design specifications for?" Dhawan asked.

She and Yalit were the only of Q's "enemies" who continued to snipe at him; as T'Laren had had some opportunity to observe the various scientists, she'd concluded that Dhawan did this because she sniped at everyone. LeBeau and Morakh seemed to be genuinely impressed by Q's ability. Perhaps seeing him reinvent an ancient technology in three days from nothing more than the information T'Laren was able to dig up for him drove it home what he could do as all his posturing about his knowledge of the anomaly could not. Anne Christian had mostly stopped sniping at Q fairly early on in the conference; her apparent conviction that he was an incarnation of amorality, if not evil, didn't seem to require her to attack him constantly. And while Q and Yalit still sparred, it was clear that Q's star was in the ascendant, and no one really paid any attention to Yalit at all.

"Easily, my dear Commander," Q purred at her. He smiled cheerily. "The purpose of this device is to increase the effective range of a telepath. Any telepath. Therefore, why don't we have a telepath test it?"

Elejani Baíi balked at being called a "telepath" when her name was suggested. "I'm merely empathic. I don't project so much as receive, and I think it would be very painful for me to be able to receive from a much larger field than normal."

T'Para didn't say so in so many words, but it was obvious she believed that anyone who asked a Vulcan to do such a thing was a terrible pervert. "Vulcan telepathy is a deeply private thing," she said. "We share the contact of minds only with close friends and family. To use our telepathy in any other way is... not what our telepathy was intended for."

Her words angered T'Laren, not at T'Para herself but at the attitude behind them. Soram had been like that-- believed any Vulcan who used her telepathy for anything other than bonding and rare communion with friends was a freak. Even if they were right, T'Laren was tired of being called a freak, tired of being told that her superior telepathic ability and her willingness to use it in the course of her Starfleet duties made her a bad Vulcan, somehow. "I am willing to test it," she said. "Sovaz can corroborate the extent of my abilities before amplification. I am rated 27."

Dhawan frowned. "Is this a Vulcan rating scale?"

Sovaz nodded. "Most Vulcans fall between 10 and 20. Healers, who are the most powerful of Vulcan telepaths, all have ratings over 30. A 27 means that, if T'Laren were to completely lower her own mental shielding and quiet her own mind, she would pick up slight emotional impressions from all the unshielded members of this gathering, to a range of about one meter around her. It also indicates how powerful her mental shielding can potentially be, how many milliseconds it would take her to form a mind meld with a nontelepath, and other such things, but I think the distance range is what we're interested in."

"All right." Dhawan nodded. "So to effectively test this, T'Laren's going to have to pick up emotional impressions from someone farther away?"

Q shrugged. "I'm not one hundred percent positive how Vulcan telepathy works. It's possible that this amplifier will give T'Laren the ability to read minds without touching the people in question at all." He glanced at T'Laren, sudden nervousness in his expression.

"I give my word that I will not read anyone's mind unless they have volunteered to allow me to do so for the purposes of the experiment," T'Laren said, having a suspicion why he was nervous. She had reassured him that she couldn't read his mind without establishing a link, and he had apparently just given her the power to get around that limitation.

Several people volunteered, and stationed themselves at various points throughout and outside the room, outside her meter range. T'Laren examined the device-- it was a headset, attached to a large unwieldy boxlike thing. She sat in the chair provided and lowered the headset over her head.

For a moment she sensed no differences. She was still as she ever was. Then she realized that she was expecting the device to make her like a Betazoid, or some other distance telepath. She was still Vulcan, and her telepathy still required a total lowering of her own shields and a quieting of her mind to accomplish. It was a little difficult to achieve the necessary trance in this crowded room full of talking people, but T'Laren had formed mind-melds in the middle of space battles before, with explosions sparking all around her and the inertial dampeners fading in and out. This was certainly not worse than that. She focused all of her mind on the sensations of the mind alone, shutting out the body's senses.

She felt the cold burning like the beginning of a link, before the body became irrelevant, but without the feeling of something hot and blazing on the other side of her fingertips, the other side of the walls around her mind. There were no walls. Instead, as she distanced herself from her body, she could sense nets of fire, other minds like blazing torches ranged around her in cool darkness. One of the nets blazed with far more ferocity than the others, and seemed somehow familiar. She drifted toward it before realizing who it was, and forcing herself to turn away before she touched him-- if Q was somehow able to feel her touch his mind, even briefly, he would be enraged, and rightly so. She had to seek out the minds that had volunteered.

Oh, but this was easy. The furthest volunteer was nowhere near the edge of her range. She forced herself back to herself, briefly. "Send someone further away."

"Further away? How many meters?"

"All of them," T'Laren said, and returned to the land of torches in the distance. The furthest volunteer was a human named Lorne. She touched his mind lightly, enough to sense his confusion-- what had the Vulcan woman meant when she said "all of them"? This experiment was dangerous, maybe they should stop it, but he wanted to know, he wanted to know about the anomaly out there and Q said this was their best chance...

"Your keyword is 'swordfish', Dr. Lorne," she said. "I don't need to go any deeper, do I?"

"Depth isn't what we're looking for," Q said. His voice was eager. "Can you project all the way to the barrier, T'Laren?"

"Don't ask her to try to project herself across twenty light-minutes until we know she can project herself to the edge of the ship," Dhawan said acerbically.

T'Laren knew that was logical, but it was an effort to restrain herself. Why, she could touch all the minds in this room and not tire. She could read Q's mind-- she was sure he'd never notice. It was to help him. She wouldn't do anything that wasn't for his good.

"Ensign Paoli, at the far end of the left nacelle, has volunteered, T'Laren. Can you find him and read his keyword?"

Paoli. So many minds, so many small fires blazing in the darkness. She scanned them very lightly as she passed, just their identities, to see if Paoli was in their self-definition. And there he was, with his keyword. "Neapolitan," she said. "That's the ice cream that's strawberry and chocolate and vanilla, all mixed together. Mother used to say naplotan, that's how I thought you spelled it until I was twelve and saw her write it on a box, it was a gift for the Vulcan couple next door, because they wanted to experience Earth cuisine, but they didn't like the flavor--"

"T'Laren!" Someone was shaking her. "T'Laren, that's too deep! Pull back!"

She opened her eyes, to see T'Para. "You disapprove of me," T'Laren said. "But I can do what you cannot."

T'Laren turned away from her body, away from T'Para trying to break the trance, and reached out toward emptiness. So much emptiness, so empty. The blazing fires were behind her. Q wanted her to reach out this way, and she would do it because she could hear his thoughts, so loud in his unshielded proximity to her, telling her to go out, to find the barrier--

\--something, the sense of a mind touching hers, a mind strangely familiar--

_mother?_

"My mother," T'Laren said, unaware of the beatific smile spreading across her face. "It's my mother..."

"It is not your mother," Q said. "T'Para, is she trying to read the barrier?"

"I can't believe she'd be able to," T'Para said. "The barrier is too far away."

"That _is_ what the amplifier is for. Is she all right?" She sensed his nervousness, concern for her tingeing his overwhelming need to know what the barrier was.

"I would need to meld with her to determine that," T'Para said.

"I don't," Elejani Baíi's voice said. "Bring her back. Turn the machine off, Q."

And then the sense of her mother's presence suddenly cut off. "_Nooo!_" T'Laren screamed, thrown back into the confines of her own mind. T'Para and Stamor were holding her down as she struggled, trying to get out of the chair to turn the device back on. "Bring her _back!_ It's my mother, Q, she's alive, I sensed her--"

"You sensed no such thing," Q said brutally. "How old were you when your mother died?"

She looked up at him, confused. Her mother wasn't dead, she had just _sensed_ her. Mom and Father had lied to her, telling her Mother was dead when it wasn't true, because she knew the dead could come back, hadn't she come back at Lhoviri's will? Hadn't she come back from _somewhere_? "I sensed her," she repeated. And then, hesitantly, "I sensed her through the barrier... it's a barrier to the world of the dead. Dead souls. I sensed my mother."

"It is not, and you did not," Q told her. "What's wrong with her? Why is she behaving like this?" There was panic in his voice.

"It is your device, Q," Soltan said. "Surely if anyone knew, you would."

"I take it you didn't expect this?" Dhawan said dryly.

"No, I... I'd never have let her use it if I'd known she'd react like this. But I've never seen anyone react this way to psionic amplification before."

"Could it be true?" Sovaz asked. "Is it possible that T'Laren was indeed amplified enough to contact... I don't know, perhaps the scattered remnants of her mother's katra?"

"That's ridiculous. If a katra is lost, it is lost," Soltan said brusquely.

"I believe she's still in trance," T'Para said, and then someone was hitting her, slapping her face. The sudden pain, the sensation of impact, drove aside the cold burning. Slowly T'Laren felt herself filling her own body again, coming back to reality.

T'Para reached to hit her again, and she caught the hand. "I am... recovered. I..." She looked around the gathering. She was sitting on the floor, and everyone was staring at her, over three dozen scientists and she had just broken down in front of all of them, begging for her mother.

"Are you all right?" Q asked.

"It would seem so."

He sighed. "You simply must be difficult, mustn't you? A perfectly straightforward experiment, and you have to wig out. I suppose your life isn't complete unless you're making mine more difficult."

She recognized that he was trying to lighten the tension, insulting her to cover his anxiety at whatever had just happened. So she forced down the annoyance she felt and responded in kind. "That _is_ my job, or so you've been telling me for months."

"Can you describe your subjective sensations while using the amplifier?" Sovaz asked eagerly.

"I sensed my mother," T'Laren said, unwilling at the moment to delve more deeply into what she'd felt, the sense of power and invulnerability, the arrogance. She remembered what she'd thought about invading Q's mind, and cringed inwardly.

"That shouldn't have happened," Q said, sounding frustrated. "That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen."

"What was it, if not my mother?" T'Laren asked.

"How would I know? You weren't supposed to perceive your mother."

"We need someone else to test it," Stamor suggested. "I would volunteer."

T'Laren looked at him, genuinely horrified for a moment. "You cannot."

"Why not?"

The puzzlement in his voice sounded genuine. _Ivory tower academic_, T'Laren thought with a touch of anger. Was she supposed to put his private life on display in front of all these people? The reason he couldn't do it was that if he was close to his time, and unbonded, he might reach to invade a nearby woman's mind-- probably Sovaz, as she was his choice-- and force a link. It was ordinarily very difficult for one Vulcan to force a link on another, though that didn't stop a man lost in the throes of pon farr from trying-- but with the link it would be child's play. If T'Laren could have been seriously tempted to read Q's mind, Stamor would never be able to resist bonding with Sovaz. She switched to Old High Vulcan so at least only the Vulcans here would understand her. "Thee art unbonded."

He blinked at her. "What?"

"You don't speak the High Speech?"

"Only one or two formal words. I have not had occasion in my life to learn."

T'Laren thought _all_ Vulcans knew at least the basic grammar and the words for bonding in Old High Vulcan, and judging from the slight puzzlement she saw in the others, she knew they were bemused by his ignorance as well. But then, Stamor _was_ a physicist. "We must speak in private," she told him, and pulled him aside.

Once they were a sufficient distance from the gathering, she explained to him in the barest of whispers why he could not risk it. He argued with her, a little more loudly than he should have, as if it truly didn't shame him for others to know he was close to his time. Perhaps he, too, was raised by humans. Or wolves, maybe. T'Laren pulled her trump card. "As _ba'shel_ to Sovaz, I say your plan is too dangerous to my kinswoman. I shall not allow it. And as a psychologist, and the closest thing to an expert on psionic amplification next to Q that we have, and the only person here who's used the device, I am eminently qualified to do so."

Stamor was furious with her. He controlled it well enough that a human couldn't have read him, but T'Laren saw the rage in his eyes, and knew any of the other Vulcans would see it as well.

But then, what did she care? If he shamed himself by showing his emotions so openly, what was that to her? She walked back to the gathering to find T'Para and Dhawan attempting to talk Sovaz out of using the device.

"I am the logical alternative," Sovaz was arguing. "My telepathic rating is not the equivalent of my sister's, but T'Laren is less disciplined than I am, and more inclined to flights of fancy. In addition, my mother yet lives, and I am familiar with the touch of her mind, as T'Laren, who lost her mother in early childhood, could not be."

For a moment T'Laren felt a sickening humiliation. So Sovaz turned on her too, calling her undisciplined and given to fancy? And then logic reasserted itself. Sovaz was merely speaking the truth, and it probably did not even occur to her that she was embarrassing T'Laren.

"Sovaz, you don't have the experience with using telepathy that your sister clearly does," T'Para said. T'Laren interpreted this as "Sovaz, you aren't a pervert like your sister," though she had to admit T'Para was doing a good job of keeping all traces of the revulsion she must feel out of her demeanor, even sounding sympathetic.

"Someone must if we're to learn anything at all about this," Sovaz said. "T'Laren's experience proves nothing if it is not replicated."

"You could get hurt," Dhawan pointed out. "T'Laren had some kind of bad reaction; we don't know what might happen to you."

"I'm a Starfleet officer," Sovaz said, as if she expected this to end the argument. And, clearly, she was right. No one raised any objections as she seated herself in the chair.

"Sovaz!" T'Laren called before she pulled the helmet down. "You must swear not to touch any minds that have not willingly opened to you."

"Of course," Sovaz said, as if this went without saying.

T'Laren shook her head. "You must swear it. Say the words." The Vulcan psyche had a much harder time with breaking an explicit promise than an implicit one, and she knew Sovaz would need the protection of an oath to keep her out of unauthorized heads.

"Is this really necessary?" Dhawan asked. "She's not a child, T'Laren."

"I am not speaking as her former sister-in-law, but as one who has used the device," T'Laren said frostily.

"My oath as a Starfleet officer and my word as a Vulcan that I will invade no unwilling minds," Sovaz said. "There, that should do it." She pulled the helmet down over her head.

"What are you sensing?" Q asked.

Sovaz' eyes took on an unfocused quality. "Fascinating... I understand why T'Laren made me swear that oath. I have such power... the temptation to use it, to learn everything everyone knows, is incredible."

"Don't lose it," Dhawan warned. "You're here for a reason."

"I haven't forgotten," Sovaz said. "I'm reaching toward the barrier now... Oh."

And a slow smile spread across her face, eerie to see on an adult Vulcan. That was how she herself must have looked, T'Laren thought. "Sovaz, do you sense T'Rafi?"

"No, not at all. But I am definitely sensing a presence."

"Characterize the presence," Markow demanded.

"I sense overwhelming curiosity," Sovaz said. "And... hospitality... no, that's not quite it. The presence... is eager to learn about us... to befriend us. The hand of friendship extended... and a sense... controlled excitement. It's pleased to be in contact with us... excited about the possibilities..." Sovaz' voice betrayed her own excitement, too lost in her explorations to maintain proper control.

"That's it," Q said. "Sovaz, characterize your own feelings toward the presence."

"Feelings?" She blinked at him. "I'm a Vulcan."

"Oh don't give me that."

"Give you what?"

"Never mind. You must be projecting something at the presence. What are you sending?"

"I am communicating... friendship. We mean no harm. We seek amicable relations and mutual exploration--"

"Are you feeling curious?"

"To the extent that curiosity can be described as an emotion, I suppose you could say I am feeling that--"

"How about excitement?"

"Q, your experiences with T'Laren may have led you to a misconception about Vulcans, but we don't get excited."

"Never mind that. I have enough anyway." He grinned broadly. "I don't know why you people can't recognize yourselves, and I haven't a clue why T'Laren would think her own self was her mother, but that's what you're doing. Your psionic energies are reflecting off the barrier, and you're reading yourselves."

"Myself?" Sovaz frowned slightly. "This doesn't _seem_ like myself..."

"It doesn't?" Q asked, seeming slightly deflated.

"Q." T'Laren had something now, knowing him. "Do the Q ever have occasions to mentally contact themselves? Across time, for instance, or something?"

"Not across time, but of course we do. An individual Q can split himself up into multiple entities if he wants; any Q who does that, and doesn't have the ability to recognize his own self down to the deepest levels of his psyche, will never reintegrate himself again. Our defenses against integrating with other Qs are too strong."

"So you would recognize yourself, if you had your powers and tried to read the barrier."

"Yes, of course."

"Mortal telepaths _can't_ segment our minds like that, Q. A humanoid who divides his mind loses the ability to reintegrate it at will; the divided selves feel like other people, and to reintegrate feels like death to all of them."

"You can't?"

"So none of us have any experience with contacting our own minds. However, Sovaz seems to have described her own subjective sensations quite well in describing the presence. As for me... there's a theory that all mammalian infants experience some confusion of the mother with the self, and this is well-documented in the case of Vulcan infants. The developing telepathic centers receive the mother's thoughts, such that Vulcans actually carry racial memories, passed through the maternal line. The only time in my-- or any Vulcan's-- life when I might have experienced something akin to contacting myself is when I was an infant, reading my mother's mind. And because my mother died when I was very young, I never had an opportunity to meld with her as a whole, developed personality myself... so if I contact myself, it triggers those buried memories, and I subconsciously analogize it to the only similar experience I've had, touching my mother. However, Sovaz _has_ melded with her mother since becoming a developed personality, so she could not associate this sensation with her infant memories of her mother, as she has learned since that her mother is _not_ her self. So she cannot jump to the conclusions my subconscious did, and instead perceives the actual personality characteristics she herself is projecting as if they come from another entity."

"Of course this is all speculation," Dhawan said. "You didn't come up with this theory until Q had already revealed what we were supposed to be seeing."

T'Laren nodded. "True. Unfortunately, Q is no expert on mortal psychology, so I suppose it was inevitable. However, a possibility occurs to me." She turned to Q. "You would recognize your own mind if you encountered it, wouldn't you?"

"Yes, but I wouldn't encounter it."

"What if _you_ used the device?"

He stared at her. "I'm not a telepath."

"No, you're not. But humans aren't psi-nulls, either. All humans have a slight amount of psionic ability, and you are a normal human in that respect. If the device allows _me_ to become as powerful as I did, it might enable you to behave as an active telepath."

She didn't quite understand Q's expression. He was looking at her with something akin to fear. "There's no way I could reach the barrier, even if it _did_ make me telepathic."

"We don't know that. Q, I don't think reaching the barrier was actually a stretch for me."

He shook his head rapidly-- definitely frightened. "It would be bad science. I know what the theory is supposed to be-- it's my theory, after all. No one would believe it. It wouldn't prove anything."

"It might be interesting in its own right," Markow said. "If you gave an ordinary human the ability to access telepathic powers, I'd imagine there would be some sort of learning curve that might be a problem. But you have some experience using telepathy, so one presumes you'd know what you were doing. It might be interesting to see what the device does for humans."

"It might also be interesting to give you the ability to walk-- for five minutes-- and then take it away from you again," Q snapped at Markow, and finally T'Laren understood why he was so upset.

Dhawan stared at him. "You know, I knew you were unbelievably rude, but I don't think I realized quite _how_ bad you are until just now," she said. "That was totally uncalled for."

"Actually, it wasn't," Markow said. "He's right. I should have known better."

Q was getting more and more agitated. "This whole thing was a mistake," he said. He turned off the machine, pulled down a panel, and reached inside.

"What are you doing?" Sovaz asked.

"Disabling the machine," he said. He straightened up. "This device is entirely too dangerous to be left in the hands of lowly creatures like yourselves. I've just pulled out a handful of leads, and I'm the only one who knows how to reconnect them. Someone else _could_ theoretically do it, I imagine, but they run a serious risk of getting it wrong and making the machine melt down while they;re using it, which would produce some rather crispy brains, I would imagine."

"I agree," T'Para said. "The temptation to use this would be too dangerous."

"So none of this proves anything?" Dhawan asked.

"It looks to me like it indicates we're on the right track," Malo said. "I checked an hour ago with Commander Mariani, and the engineers are almost done configuring the clockwork probe." T'Laren remembered from discussions she'd overheard that it was Malo's idea to use clockwork in the first place. Somehow it didn't strike her as at all odd that the first scientist to think of such a distinctly low-tech solution would be a Bajoran.

"When will it be ready to use?" Q asked.

"Two days, she said."

Q nodded, and looked at Dhawan. "When that probe goes through, that's when you'll have your incontrovertible answers, my dear."

* * *

After the conference broke up and everyone returned to their quarters or did whatever they usually did whenever they weren't at the conference, T'Laren noticed Q being unusually subdued. "I'm sorry about putting you on the spot like that," she said. "I should have realized you wouldn't want to use the device yourself."

"Oh, I wanted to," he said. "When you told me there was some possibility it might at least let me have my telepathy back, if nothing else... it certainly wasn't that I didn't want to."

"Then why didn't you?"

"For the same reason I don't want to take euphorics." He stared at the carpet. "I could be so easily addicted to a crutch like that. And the moment I was, someone would use that to enslave me. They've tried to enslave me, or at least control me, with everything I enjoy. What would they do if I was actually addicted to something?"

She didn't point out that in her opinion he had already been dependent on sedatives and painkillers. There was a distinction between the medical dependency he suffered from, the fact that he had conditioned himself to require sedatives before sleeping and run up such a high tolerance to painkillers that he needed megadoses, and a powerful psychological dependency, like a device that could make him a telepath. "Based on what you know of humans and of psionic amplification, do _you_ think it would have worked?"

"Not to get me anywhere near the barrier, no. But to make me a telepath? Yes, I think it could have." He looked at her. "Do you know what it's like to be deaf to your native language?" There was almost a pleading note to his voice.

"No, I can't say I do. Is that what it feels like to you?"

"Speech is incredibly clumsy." He gestured. "Even your body language-- well, humans' body language, you people don't _have_ a body language-- doesn't carry enough of the overtones. We speak on so many levels of speech at once, with your mortal speech translating as only the most superficial upper layer. To be limited only to that-- it's like you're used to hearing symphonies, and now all the music you get is someone singing a cappella. Off-key."

"And yet you're afraid of telepathy."

"I'm afraid of other people's telepathy. If I were a telepath, I wouldn't be frightened." He looked at her hard. "Did you read my mind today?"

"No. I found it enormously, almost overwhelmingly tempting," she admitted, "but I managed to restrain myself. Did you know that would happen?"

"I hadn't a clue." He sagged. "I _knew_ about psionic amplification. I knew what it could do. And I still built the damned thing. I'm going to toss it in the warp core-- it's way too dangerous."

"You couldn't have known."

"I _could_ have. I should have; in a way, I even did. I've _seen_ what happens to mortals when you grant them superior powers. If you Vulcans didn't make a religion of self-control, we'd probably all be bowing down and worshipping you and Sovaz now."

"Is there any danger that someone might be able to repair the device, and use it?"

"Dhawan had Washington put a handful of goons on guard around the thing, and like I said, if you don't know how to reconnect the leads you have something like a 96% chance of frying the machine or yourself or both. So I'd say not." He slumped back in the chair, closing his eyes, one arm thrown over his forehead. "Still, tomorrow I think I'm going to dispose of it. It'll be safe for tonight, but the longer the temptation exists..." He opened his eyes and sat up slightly, looking at her. "T'Laren, I don't even know if _I_ can resist the temptation of that thing indefinitely."

"Do you want me to accompany you when you go to destroy it?"

"Can I trust you?"

She considered. "If the device really had had the ability to contact the dead, and I truly was able to make contact with my natural mother... then no. Since that's not the case, however, I feel no desire to use the device again. That kind of power simply doesn't interest me-- certainly it was thrilling and tempting while I had it, but now... I search my mind for an emotional reaction to the idea of using it again, and find only uneasiness. So I suspect I'm as safe as is possible."

He nodded. "All right, then. You can back me up..." He sounded very, very weary.

"You've had a strenuous day. Why don't you get some rest?"

Q got up without arguing with her. He'd argued this particular point less and less often, of late. "Good idea," he said tiredly. "I'll see you whenever."

She remained in the common room, reading, for another half hour before the doorbell chimed.

Stamor stood at the door, looking as agitated as a Vulcan ever got. "I must speak with you."

T'Laren stepped back to let him in. "About what?"

He was carrying a device of some kind, which was humming. T'Laren glanced down at it. "What is that?"

"It's something for Q. I need to show it to him."

"He's asleep at the moment."

"I thought that might be the case." Stamor set the device down on a table. "He isn't the only person I've come here to see."

"I have discussed the issue with Sovaz. She wishes you to speak with her parents before she makes a decision."

"I see. You have my thanks."

He came uncomfortably close to her as he spoke. Surprised, T'Laren backed away slightly, but more by unconscious instinct than any real fear. She didn't move to defend herself until Stamor suddenly lunged at her, and by then it was too late.

A hand came down on her shoulder. T'Laren twisted wildly, trying to pull away before his hand closed on the nerves, but didn't get far. His fingers missed the correct point and hit her millimeters off instead. She slumped, numb, stunned but not unconscious.

Stamor flung her down, and then apparently seemed to think twice about it. He bent, his hands reaching for her temples in the pattern of a meld. Terror seared through her-- he was going to attempt to mindrape her! And yet, along with the terror was a fierce fury and exhilaration. Her body was useless, stunned by the nerve pinch, but her mind, though clouded, was still her own. And she was a powerful telepath, experienced with melds under hostile conditions. He was moving the battle from the arena where he'd already defeated her to the one where she still had a chance of success.

Cold fire pressed against her temples, a burning that made the world recede, as she felt an alien presence touch her mind. T'Laren didn't wait for him to invade. She launched her mind forward, pushing past the barriers he was already lowering in preparation for invading her, invading his mind.

_"Adral tr'Sahlassiu, do you understand that if you take this mission it will be decades before you can return to the Romulan Empire?"_

T'Laren recoiled in horror from the truths she absorbed from the spy's mind. The Tal Shiar telepaths were a nightmare of hers. Stories were told of secret Romulan breeding projects to create more telepaths by raping captive Vulcans and raising their offspring to be loyal Romulans. While she'd been on Romulus, that had been her fear-- not for her life, which any spy could lose if caught, but that she would be mindraped, and drugged with the potions that caused pleasurable lust in Romulans and maddening need in Vulcans, and then raped and forced to bear children who would be willing slaves of the Romulan Empire. When she'd first touched his mind and sensed what he was, that was what she'd feared-- why else would a Vulcanoid male assault a woman and force a mindmeld on her? But then the rest of it had come to her, and she'd realized she'd misread the danger entirely.

She was not Stamor/Adral tr'Sahlassiu's target. Q was.

*_You are his psychologist. I need to know how to break him-- his knowledge is far too great for me to absorb in one session. I need to make him pliable, rewrite his desires so he wishes me to meld with him and take what I need. If anyone knows where his vulnerabilities are, it would be you.*_

And that was why he had come to her, courting Sovaz. To give him an excuse to come in to her while Q was asleep. The existence of the telepathic amplifier had forced his hand; he hadn't intended to come at her today, but he feared that she would persuade Q to repair the device, and that she'd see his intentions in his mind. He had had to strike before that.

_I'll give you no such information_, T'Laren snarled back at him, battering at the Romulan's mind, trying to force him back.

*_If you don't give me the information I need, then he's too dangerous for me to let live for a second session. I'll have to kill him._* He showed her graphic images of the last three he'd killed, the look of agony on their faces when they died, the pain of their brains exploding.

_Q would rather die than be your slave, I'm sure_.

It should have been easy for her. The meld had already taken place; they were each inside each other's minds, vulnerable to one another. But she had trained to meld with aliens while holding her own psyche intact to facilitate communication-- not to engage in telepathic combat. tr'Sahlassiu, on the other hand, was adept at breaking the minds of others. Even Vulcans.

He forced his way through her defenses, looking for her memories of Q, and she couldn't stop him. She couldn't stop him.

T'Laren withdrew from the mental violation, pulling her ego back from the meld, and focused instead on her body. It was almost impossible for a Vulcan to make herself move during a meld, unless it was in the context of sex when instinct took over, but T'Laren had done it before in her Starfleet career. With all the force she possessed, she commanded her body to shove tr'Sahlassiu and get to her feet.

She was sluggish, weak, but he was entirely lost in the world of the mind. He sensed nothing until her hands shoved him back, breaking the contact between them, and with it, the link. T'Laren struggled to her feet. "Q! Get help!" she screamed.

With the link broken, tr'Sahlassiu had full control of his own body, however, since he hadn't been nerve-pinched before. With no finesse, he hit her, slamming her head back against the wall. Already dazed, T'Laren had no opportunity to protect herself. She struck the wall, and then everything went dark.

* * *

In his room, Q was wakened by T'Laren's shout. "Q! Get help!"

_Get help for what?_ he thought groggily. And then he heard the thwack of a fist against skin and bone, and the solid thud of a skull hitting something much harder than it was, and nothing more from T'Laren. Terror awakened him fully. There was an assassin out there, trying to get in to kill him, and T'Laren might very well already be dead.

"Computer! Lock door!" Q shouted.

"Unable to comply. Requested circuits inaccessible."

"_What?_" Q grabbed his combadge. "Q to Security, help!"

Still no reply. A terrified moan choked in Q's throat. The assassin had cut him off somehow. What a fool he'd been to leave Starbase 56! The security of _this_ place was hardly geared around protecting him the way Starbase 56's was. He threw the covers aside and ran to his terminal. Once, on the starbase, assassins had brought down the computer's ability to process voice commands, but it still had been possible to use the keyboard. He had managed to summon help while a security guard held the assassins off in the other room. Perhaps that would work here.

Q used the keyboard to invoke the command processor, and quickly typed in code to transmit a message to the intercom of the security offices. Before he was finished, however, the door slid open, and one of the Vulcan scientists-- Stamor, the one who'd had a tantrum because T'Laren wouldn't let him test the amplifier-- stood there.

The terminal was entirely too close to the door. Q abandoned it, his code half-typed, knowing there was no way he could send a message in time, and backed away. "Let me guess," he said shakily. "You want me to put your name on the paper when it's published."

Stamor said something in a language Q didn't know. This time, he heard the faint click of the door locking. "If you don't resist me, I won't hurt you," Stamor said, coming forward.

"Oh, right. You'll just kill me painlessly. No thank you." He backed around the bed, eyes flickering over the room, looking for something he could use as a weapon. Maybe he could slip past the Vulcan, who probably wasn't a Vulcan after all, and run. Or something. He had to do something. He had just decided life was worth living, it was so unfair, why did he have to face an assassin _now?_ Why couldn't one have come two months ago, when he'd _wanted_ to die?

"I'm not here to kill you. I only want what's in your mind."

"The psionic amplifier."

"That, and other things. I'll have no need to kill you if you cooperate with me."

The offer was not tempting. Q was far more afraid of having his mind invaded than he was of dying. And the thought occurred to him that whoever this person was, if he wasn't an assassin then he probably didn't come from a highly technologically advanced species; he was probably Federation-level or less. And if he was telling the truth, then he wanted Q's knowledge, which made it all the more imperative that he not get it. Q had a responsibility not to let himself be used to destabilize the petty mortal politics of the quadrant, even if he'd owed no loyalty to the Federation at all.

"Somehow that is not the most reassuring thing I've ever heard," Q said, using bravado to keep himself from screaming in terror or begging for mercy. He could see only one possible way out. Stamor was following him around the bed, and would have backed him into a corner in moments. Right now, though, Stamor was not in Q's most direct path to the door-- he was coming around the bed, and if Q went across the bed, he might be able to reach the other side before Stamor could get to him. And maybe the door wasn't really locked. Maybe he'd just imagined that noise.

Q leapt onto the bed, took a step forward, and started to leap off the other side. Stamor grabbed at his leg, tripping him, so Q ended up flying off the bed and toward the floor head first. Some of T'Laren's training took over, and he managed to twist his body so that he hit the floor with his hands and chest instead of his head. He got to his feet as fast as he possibly could, long experience with trying to get up and run while being beaten up serving him in good stead, but Stamor was in front of him now and pushed him back. Impossibly strong hands grasped Q's wrists, pinning him, shoving him back so the bed caught him in the backs of the legs.

"_HELP!_ Help me, please! Someone, anyone, help!"

"They can't hear you," Stamor said. "There's a forcefield around this room that disrupts communications. There's no one to hear you but T'Laren, and she's beyond hearing anyone."

T'Laren was dead. Oh no, no. And then Stamor bent him backwards, pushing him against the bed. Q screamed at the strain on his back as he was bent in a direction his stiff muscles emphatically did not want to go. "Please stop, please, my back, please it hurts it hurts--"

And then he had fallen back onto the bed, his back shrieking, with Stamor lying on top of him in an entirely too intimate position, one hand reaching for Q's temples as the other kept his wrists cruelly pinned against the bed. Q struggled, screaming, frantic with terror, but even though his wrists were actually too wide for Stamor to hold in one hand, the Vulcanoid's strength was enough to keep one pinned on top of the other, crushing them, and without his hands, Q had no leverage to push Stamor away from him, though he was physically bigger than the other man.

The fingertips against his temples felt like fire-- a cold fire, that spread through his body and numbed it unpleasantly. He felt the sense of a presence touching his psyche, where only other Q had ever touched him before. _GET OUT!!_

To his shock and amazement, the presence cut off behind a barrier. Q remembered T'Laren and Markow speculating that a human who had once wielded telepathic power would have some idea what he was doing-- they hadn't said, "perhaps enough to shield himself," but now Q thought of it. He had millenia of experience trying to keep his fellow Q out of his head. Maybe he could protect himself against this mental rapist, after all. If he could only hang on long enough for help to arrive-- surely they would notice an alien forcefield on their ship-- Picard's crew would have--

\--And what if it took them too long?

_I won't think about that, I won't..._

_*You should_,* a distant voice came from outside his shield. *_They'll never sense it in time. It hides itself from their sensors. Give in to me, and I won't kill you_.*

_That's still not a very tempting offer_, Q retorted, strengthening his shields. They were like certain muscles, whose tightness couldn't be accurately judged unless they were closing around a solid object. He imagined them as a barrier, firming them against the invasion from outside.

Stamor battered at Q's shields, using no finesse at all, nothing but raw telepathic power, and horrified, Q felt his defenses starting to crumble. They'd never been designed to keep out people with more raw power than he had, after all. Terrified, he channelled all his terror at the shields, all his formidable willpower at a single, overriding imperative. _Keep out of my head!_

But he couldn't withstand the sheer power Stamor had to turn against him. His shields weakened, weakened, and finally crumbled entirely, and he felt the triumphant invasion of his mind as if it really were akin to a rape. _NO!_ He tried to push the invader back out, but all his strength had gone to his shields, and now that they were broken he had no way to keep the other out of his head.

_You fight well, for a non-telepath. But you have to realize, I'm much more powerful than you are. Why not just relax and give in? You're only hurting yourself by resisting._

This far into his own mind was past the level of surface speech, the level where Q would use flip defiance to protect himself. His response was a wave of raw emotion and thoughtform. _disgusting filthy mortal creature how dare you invade MY mind! MINE! get out, get out, GET OUT!_

_You're mortal yourself. Helpless to resist me. You don't have the power to protect yourself, you're now even lowlier than I am, you deserve this for losing your powers._ The litany repeated softly into the depths of Q's mind, trying to break him, trying to make him believe it. The worst of it was that part of him did.

Grimly Q continued to resist, this time by the elaborate feints and misdirections he'd use against the Continuum, or against his older siblings when he was young and hadn't the raw power they had. He tangled his assailant in false leads. He took the battle _to_ his attacker, reaching into the other's mind-- apparently his own lack of active telepathy meant nothing now that the other's telepathy had forced a link-- and going for the jugular, evoking the worst memories in the young man's memory. A Tal Shiar officer had many memories that haunted his nightmares. Q found them and flung them at the Romulan's ego, using them as a shield as he hid his own memories in a maze of false trails.

None of it did him any good. The Romulan's sheer power bulldozed through most of Q's traps. It took a long time, or what felt like a long time-- Q had spent millennia doing this, after all, and was better skilled at defending himself than any of the Romulan's other victims had been. He picked up that thought from his assailant's mind, and the brief flash of pride and hope it gave him bolstered him for a moment. But eventually he was exhausted, panting, run to ground in the mazes of his own mind, and the relentless stalker was on top of him, probing him. Seeking out his memories, invading the most private sanctuary he had, and he couldn't resist anymore. He had fought as long and as hard as he could, and now he had no strength left.

Quickly the invader moved from Q's personal memories to his knowledge, began reading through it, while Q's battered ego huddled in a tiny corner of his mind, keeping as much of himself away from the attacker as possible. Intellectually he knew that his personal memories were less valuable, that the real danger lay in letting the Romulan have access to his knowledge, but emotionally it felt like a small mercy, that the parts of him important to _him_ were no longer being violated. He had some dim sense that the man intended to kill him when he was done, leakage from the Romulan's own psyche. Defeated, he curled his psyche into as tight and small a knot as he could manage, and waited, despairing, for the end.

And then there was what seemed to him like a bright light flaring across his consciousness. Just for a nanosecond, he felt a sense of Presence, as familiar to him as his own mind. And then he was once more conscious of his physical body, blearily, as he stared up at a blurry ceiling and heard someone screaming.

There was a flare of phaser light, and voices. Weakly Q turned his head toward the door. Lt. Washington, three security guards, and a very short male humanoid in medical blues who looked rather like a potato with legs were coming through what remained of his door. Someone was still screaming. He looked down-- a painful thing to do; his back screamed in protest that he would dare move-- and saw the Romulan on the floor, holding his head and shrieking. Green trickled out of the man's nose and ears and from his lip.

The short man pointed a scanner at Q. "He looks mostly unhurt," he reported, and knelt next to the Romulan, whom the security team were all holding phasers on. "But this one's dying. Cerebral hemorrhage."

"Can you save him?"

"I can ease his pain-- he's in agony. But there's nothing I can do to keep him alive."

And then the Romulan shuddered, let out a final exhalation, and went silent.

"Are you all right, Q? Can you get up?" Washington asked.

He tried to sit up, and fell back in pain-- not just from his back, but an unexpected agony in his head, like the worst migraine he'd ever had. "Lie still," the short man said, and pressed a hypo against Q's neck. "That should take enough of the pain off that you can get to Sickbay."

Q tried to sit up again. This time the pain in his back was less, and felt removed, as if he were wrapped in blankets against it. "They saved me," he whispered, stunned and grateful. There were already tears in his eyes from terror and pain; new ones welled now, but these were of reverential and disbelieving gratitude.

"Who saved you, Q?" Washington asked.

"My people... they saved me..."

He was certain of it. They'd caused the Romulan's death because the man was about to kill Q. They'd saved his life. They really did care about him after all. It was too much for him, after the horror of the assault and the pain he was still feeling in his head, a throbbing migraine headache, and he began to cry softly. The Q loved him. They had saved his life. They wanted him to live and earn his way back to them after all.

"We need to get you to sickbay," the doctor said. "Do you think you can walk?"

He nodded, still crying. But when he tried to stand, the world spun around him, and he sat down again, dizzily. "I need help," he said, and then thought of T'Laren, who always helped him at times like this. And then remembered that the telepath had said T'Laren was dead.

"T'Laren! Where is she? Is she--"

"She's alive and recovering in the other room, but she's taken a nasty bump to the head. She needs to go to sickbay too."

"Oh..." Q wasn't quite sure he believed that. Maybe they were saying that to make him feel better because he'd had a shock. "I want to see her."

"Help him into the other room," Washington told one of his security guards.

The man wrapped Q's arm over his shoulder and stood, supporting Q as he tried to stand himself. The world still spun dizzily, but with support he could manage it without falling back down again. It was not the first time Q had needed help walking, and he was reasonably practiced at letting the other take a good portion of his weight while he navigated his way painstakingly into the other room.

T'Laren was leaning against the wall, seated on the floor, eyes closed. There was a massive greenish-black bruise running along the side of her cheek and temple, with some of it extending onto her forehead. "T'Laren?" Q said fearfully. She looked unconscious, perhaps even dead.

Her eyes opened, flooding him with relief. "Q! Are you all right?" she asked hoarsely.

"Fine. Never better." He made his way over to her and let the security guard let him down on the floor next to her. "That's quite an unsightly bruise you've got there."

Her hand reached up and touched it lightly. "I hadn't noticed," she said. "It's probably worse than it looks. I have a mild concussion and my sense of balance is impaired, which is why I'm sitting on the floor. What happened? I heard someone screaming..."

Q felt himself smiling, almost without volition, his eyes stinging with happy tears again. "He's dead," he said. "T'Laren, they saved me."

"Security?"

"No! The Continuum. They _saved_ me, T'Laren. He was going to kill me, and they blasted his brain into so much cerebral jelly. They really do..." he cut off. It was acceptable to say to T'Laren, "They really do care about me," but it was entirely too much to reveal in front of a security guard.

She put her hand on his arm, gently. "I thought he would kill you," she said softly.

He interpreted that as not wanting to use emotional phrases like "and I was frightened for you" or "I'm glad he didn't" in front of the security guard herself-- she might be a Vulcan pervert, but she didn't want to let the entire starship see how weird she was, he thought. He held the hand on his arm, warmed by the gesture and feeling as if he might start crying again, which was unacceptable. It was idiotic of him to be crying anyway. He hadn't been hurt-- well, not badly anyway, though his back and head still ached and he still felt too dizzy to walk under his own power. Not nearly as badly as he could have been hurt. And the man who'd violated his mind was dead, and he'd had a sign in the form of that death that his own people still cared for him and were watching out for him. Why should he be crying?

The doctor came into the room then, followed by Washington and the other guards. "How do you feel, either of you?" he asked.

"As well as can be expected," T'Laren said. "I believe I have a concussion, but I don't think it's serious."

"You do, and I'll have to be the judge of that. Q, what about you?"

"Perfectly happy. Except I have a headache. Can I have some more painkillers?"

The doctor ran the scanner over him again. "Oh my. This is not good at all." He tapped his combadge. "Three to transport to sickbay, immediately."

Before Q could ask what the problem was, he felt the disorientation of a transporter beam sweep over him and deposit him in Sickbay, still seated on the floor. A nurse helped him to his feet and got him onto a bed, lying down. Now he was starting to get a little bit frightened. "What's wrong with me?" he demanded.

"Amalyzine," the doctor said. Someone handed him a hypo, so Q presumed that that was not an answer to his question. The doctor pressed it to his neck-- and the headache disappeared within seconds.

"You were very close to suffering a cerebral hemorrhage yourself," the doctor told him. "The migraine headache you were suffering from after your attack was the result of leakage from your assailant's mind building up a potential aneurysm in the blood vessels of your brain when he died; essentially, whatever killed him came very, very close to killing you too. If he hadn't broken the connection between your minds when he did, you would have died-- and if we hadn't caught it in time, you might have suffered a stroke later tonight anyway."

At first, Q's only emotional reaction to the words was a feeling that once again, he'd had a close call. Then the meaning sank home, the meaning that the doctor couldn't know, and it was like a wash of liquid nitrogen in his veins, far too cold and painful to be mere ice. Whatever had killed the Romulan had almost killed him... he might have died tonight without treatment...

They hadn't cared. They had acted to kill the Romulan, not to save Q but to prevent his knowledge from being spread to lesser races without his control. What sort of fool was he, to believe they had killed the man to protect _him?_ They hadn't tried to stop the Romulan's actions by killing Q, no, but they hadn't cared if that was the result. He might have died if the Romulan hadn't broken contact right then, might have died anyway, and they simply hadn't cared.

The revelation, on top of the emotional trauma he'd suffered tonight, and after he'd believed so strongly that the Romulan's death meant the Continuum still loved him, was too much. He closed his eyes and curled up tightly on the bed, ignoring the pain in his back, wanting very much to be dead.

"Q?" T'Laren said. He opened his eyes, looking over at where she was seated on the other bed. "Q, are you all right?"

He didn't want to talk to her. He wanted nothing to do with anyone. "I'm tired," he said dully. Saying he was fine would just mean more poking and prodding from her.

"All right," she said, nodding and turning her attention back to the doctor working on her. That infuriated him. He had wanted her not to pry, but now that she wasn't, he felt as if she was paying no attention, that she didn't care about his pain. Fine. Let her not care. He had never really needed her anyway. He closed his eyes again and pressed his face into the pillow, stifling a sob. He couldn't cry in public, in front of doctors. He didn't need that kind of humiliation.

"Q, does your back still hurt?" someone asked him.

He opened his eyes to see a female nurse, or maybe a very junior doctor-- in Starfleet, where medical personnel often spent their internship as nurses and then graduated to being full doctors when they were promoted to lieutenants, it was sometimes hard to tell the difference. "Does it matter?" he said, his voice still dull.

"Of course it matters," she said. "Here. Lie on your stomach."

He still didn't see much of a point-- he hurt, and he should hurt, because life as a human was pain and he'd just been informed that his particular life was meaningless to the only people that mattered. But he did it, since he didn't feel like arguing, and since it didn't matter anyway. Having his back fixed would also hurt, probably more than the injury did. T'Laren was the only person who'd ever bothered to fix his back without hurting him.

The woman took some sort of instrument-- he saw it in his peripheral vision, and tensed despite himself, expecting pain-- and held it to his back. He heard a humming, and to his vast surprise, felt a pleasurable vibration deep within the muscles, felt them loosening, without any pain at all. "What are you doing?"

"It's a sonic massager," the nurse said cheerfully. "That doesn't hurt, does it?"

He thought about lying and saying it did, but there didn't seem to be much point to it. She probably wouldn't stop if it did hurt, and anyway, despite his depression it _did_ feel good, and he didn't think he'd have had the energy to try to make her stop even if it had hurt. "No."

"That's good. You seem to have strained the muscles in your lower back pretty badly. This will relax them, and then we'll use a deep protoplaser to help them heal faster. But they have to be relaxed first, or the protoplaser will cause them to heal up tighter than they should be, and you'd have trouble relaxing them afterward."

The explanation made him feel a tiny bit better. Li had never bothered to explain anything to him. Medical procedures had simply been performed on him, some of them painful, without any acknowledgement from Li that Q had either the intellect to understand what was going on or the right to make decisions about whether or not he wanted a particular procedure done. This was understandable when Q was dying from the latest assassination attempt, but not when he was aware and conscious and not in immediate danger of death. The fact that this nurse bothered to explain what she would do made him feel a little bit more valued. Which was good, because clearly the important people didn't value him at all, so he had to take whatever little scraps he could get.

* * *

T'Laren hadn't fully realized the extent to which she was disturbed by what had happened until Tris came down to sickbay to see her. Until that point, she was focused on Q and what he must be going through-- this was his worst nightmare come to life, after all. She had little time to think about what she herself had endured until the doctor was close to finished with her, and Tris came in. "T'Laren, are you all right? How do you feel?"

She examined her own feelings for the first time since the incident, and realized that what she felt was an overwhelming sense of frustration, rage and helplessness. It was worse than what she would have felt if she had been the assassin's only target. T'Laren had once been physically raped, one of the few people she knew who had been, due to her own carelessness on a non-aligned planet, on shore leave. The experience had left her angry and shaken and had inspired her to focus intently on unarmed combat techniques at the level a Security or Command officer needed to know rather than the level an aspiring Counselor was usually trained in. But it hadn't been like this, because she'd been the only person hurt by the experience. She hadn't gotten someone else hurt as well.

Once, she had counseled a lieutenant in security whose wife had endured the same thing, because she had had little combat training and he'd been defeated by the thugs that attacked them. He had handled the incident far worse than his wife; while she had put it past her as one of the dangers one faced when one left Earth and secure Federation worlds, he had been in agony because he was supposed to protect his wife, and he hadn't been able to. He had had the security training, he had been taught how to fight and bodyguard, and yet he had been beaten to near-senselessness and held down as his attackers took turns hurting the person he most wanted to protect. He had not been one of T'Laren's successes; despite all she tried to do for him, he eventually divorced his wife so she would never be hurt by his failures again and dropped out of Starfleet. At the time, T'Laren had had only an intellectual understanding of his pain, and had thought his reaction was extreme. Now she understood.

"Physically, I'm as well as can be expected."

"Which means you must be in agony."

It was a joke. She recognized that, but she was in no mood for humor. "No, the pain was moderate and responded easily to the mental disciplines. That much I can do. It is more..." She hesitated.

He sat down next to her, putting an arm around her waist. Such a little thing, the physical contact that in humans and Bajorans substituted for what Vulcans could get with the mind-bond, that had to serve as her substitute as well, she who was bonded to no one. "I couldn't stop him," she said softly. "All my training, all my skill, was essentially useless. I've been trained to fight, to defend myself against Romulans in particular, and I've always considered myself a better-than-fair telepath... and it was all nothing."

"You can't blame yourself, T'Laren. You've had some training, but attacking people and forcing himself into their minds was apparently this man's career. It's not reasonable to expect that you could have stopped him. And you did slow him down-- that's important. You might have saved Q's life by making tr'Sahlassiu fight you harder than he would have ordinarily had to."

It was the way that one comforted Vulcans-- one argued from logic. Unfortunately T'Laren had thought of all that herself already. "I understand all that. And if I had anywhere near the grasp of proper discipline that I should, the fact that there was, in all logic, no way I _could_ have stopped him should prevent me from feeling as if I'd failed. But I find I cannot make myself stop feeling that way." She looked down. "As usual, I'm a spectacular failure as a Vulcan, whether or not I succeed at my career."

"So you're blaming yourself for failing to fight off an assassin that's much more experienced than you are, and you're blaming yourself for blaming yourself. That takes talent, T'Laren. Think you can get any more self-loathing out of the situation if you work hard at it?"

"You don't understand. I'm not alone, and I'm not the only one who will be hurt if I falter. I've taken on a responsibility to Q-- if I fail, he's the one who will pay the price."

"So if you're on a planet with him and the sun spontaneously goes nova, that's your fault? T'Laren, you're no more a god than he is now. You have an obligation to protect him to the best of your ability, but that ability simply doesn't include the ability to fight off trained Romulan telepathic assassins. Recognize when you're out of your league, and accept it."

"And if your people had recognized that the Cardassians were out of their league and accepted it, wouldn't you all still be their slaves?"

"Someone being out of your league doesn't mean you don't fight them. It just means you shouldn't blame yourself if you lose."

What he was saying was true, but T'Laren's feelings of failure didn't seem to want to respond to logic. Which, actually, was the best description of it. Surely she was capable of resisting this, and yet she seemed to be choosing to wallow in her pain.

* * *

As the nurse continued to work on him, Q heard T'Laren's voice, and Tris. _What is he doing here?_ Q turned his head, to the point where it hurt his neck, to try to see what was happening.

T'Laren was still sitting on the bed. Tris was sitting right next to her, one arm around her, as she was speaking in a low voice. And Q felt an overwhelming sense of loss and fury.

She had turned to _him_ for comfort. She had taken Q's statement that he was tired at face value, without probing any deeper, something she would have done at any other time, and she had turned to Tris for comfort instead of asking Q. After all the times that she had comforted him, _he_ wanted to be the one to help her. Wasn't that what friends were for?

But they weren't friends. She had said so herself, again and again. She was merely his psychotherapist. If she gave him comfort, it was because it was her job, not because she cared about him, not because they were friends. And the proof of that sat in front of him, telling her it was perfectly normal to feel as she did, to stop beating herself up for not being able to hold to Vulcan standards when she hadn't been raised as Vulcans were, reassuring her. _Tris_ was T'Laren's friend, the person she turned to when _she_ needed someone. She would never ask a selfish emotional cripple to give her anything. She would never need anything from him.

No one, in fact, needed anything from him. Not even the Continuum, who couldn't care less if they accidentally killed him.

Q stared at T'Laren and Tris for several moments in a white-hot jealous rage. If he'd had the power to strike them dead with a thought, he would have.

* * *

This wasn't helping. As logical as Tris' words were, T'Laren couldn't make herself believe them. She looked up, over at Q, and stiffened slightly, startled. The expression on his face was one of betrayal and rage, as if he agreed with her that she had failed him.

Tris apparently noticed T'Laren's reaction and followed her eyes. As soon as Tris looked at him, Q turned away and pressed his face into his pillow.

* * *

He had to look away as soon as they noticed him, unwilling to let T'Laren or especially Tris see how much he was hurting. Q buried his face in his pillow as the nurse continued to work on his back, and concentrated very hard on not crying.

* * *

"T'Laren," Tris said quietly, too quietly for any but a Vulcan to hear, "you're having serious boundary problems here. You have got to talk to Q about this, or else stop seeing him as a client."

What was he talking about? T'Laren glanced at Tris. "He's angry with me for getting him hurt. I don't see how that is a boundary problem."

"You really don't see it, do you?"

"What do you see?"

"He's _jealous_, T'Laren. That look on his face was jealousy, pure and simple. And if he reacts like that to an old friend trying to comfort you, what is he going to do if you really do decide to pursue a relationship with someone?"

She shook her head, not in negation but in some amount of disbelief. "I've discussed this with Q. He's well aware that I am not going to become sexually involved with him, and while I believe he finds me physically attractive, he denies feeling any emotional connection to me beyond friendship. He knows this."

"He's also probably not being very rational right now. You don't normally make this mistake, T'Laren, but I think you're attributing more rationality to him than humans possess. You're either going to have to work with him on this a lot more... or it might be that he'll never be able to think rationally about this kind of thing. If he's in love with you and claiming he's not, he might not be able to deal with it in anything resembling a rational fashion. It might be that the only thing you can do is pull out."

"Why are you so eager to see me give up Q as a client?"

"Because I think he's dangerous to you. I think you're a lot closer to losing your objectivity than you think you are, if you haven't lost it entirely. And if you did end up falling in love with him... you have a bad habit of letting the men you love walk all over you, and the fact that Q is a lot more emotionally needy than Soram was will just ensure that you excuse everything he does on the grounds that he's not well. And he'll never _get_ well, because you'll let him get away with being an inconsiderate asshole, and before you know it you'll be trapped in another abusive relationship. You deserve better than that, T'Laren."

"It isn't going to happen. Soram... I do not call what Soram did 'abuse'. He merely expected and needed me to be a normal Vulcan wife, and I was not. I cannot be vulnerable to a non-Vulcan in quite that way-- I let Soram 'walk on me', in your words, because I was trying to be a proper Vulcan and he knew how I should do it. I was following his guidance."

"You were miserable."

"That was hardly his fault. Most Vulcans live the way Soram asked me to, and are not at all miserable."

"So you've figured out how to blame yourself for the fact that your husband was cold, cruel and incapable of giving you what you needed."

"Who else is there to blame? If I hadn't tried so hard to walk the line between, hadn't tried to take what was valuable from both Earth and Vulcan instead of giving myself wholeheartedly to one or the other, I would have been a proper Vulcan and in no need of the things Soram could not give... or a human, for all my Vulcan blood, and I never would have married him in the first place. It was my choice to try to pick and choose, and Soram was the one who paid for it."

"He didn't seem to be that terribly broken up about it."

_He was dead. I murdered him. The blood ran down my hands like emerald water, essence of life, flowing free..._ "You cannot understand."

"Because I'm not a Vulcan?"

"Because I haven't told you everything. And I won't, I can't, so don't ask. But I cannot give up Q as a patient because I fear some amorphous harm to me. Only if there is a threat to him can I stop, and I don't believe there is one yet." She looked at him. "Tris, in all other aspects of my life I find it hard to trust my own judgment, but I have looked long and hard and I think I am still unimpaired when it comes to my clients. You'll simply have to trust me."

"It's difficult when you don't trust yourself."

"I know."

* * *

The doctors recommended that both T'Laren and Q remain overnight for observation. Q could hardly make himself care enough to protest. He wanted only to sleep, to achieve oblivion and forget his misery.

Almost despite himself, he felt better in the morning. He didn't quite want to-- he had excellent reasons for being miserable, and he felt that by feeling better, he was somehow betraying himself. But he couldn't help it-- the morning did give distance. He had survived, as usual. The Continuum couldn't care less if he lived or died, but so what else was new? And T'Laren didn't want to confide in him-- well, when had she ever wanted to, and why would he want to anyway? Let someone else hold her hand. That wasn't his job.

The attack was a major topic of conversation at the conference. This irritated and flattered Q at the same time. He didn't want the prying questions, the expressions of sympathy, the constant buzz of reminder about the brutal attack-- and yet, it had been a long time since an attempt on his life had raised such a large and sympathetic stir. The scientists weren't jaded like the residents of Starbase 56 had become-- to them, this was a horrifying and singular event, the attempted assassination of one of their own, and there was an outpouring of support for Q and outrage that such a thing could happen here. In vain Washington and Wilde tried to explain how Stamor's credentials had been impeccable, how there had been no reasonable way to catch Romulan infiltrators with such a good cover short of subjecting all Vulcans to forced telepathic probes, which wouldn't go over very well with the Vulcans, and making everyone who wasn't a Vulcan undergo a detailed medical examination. Since the medical exams, at least, _were_ a precaution Starbase 56 took, Q made life difficult for Washington and Wilde, pointing out in his best insolent drawl that if they were going to invite him to their silly little conference, the least they could do was keep him from getting killed during it with some elementary security precautions. For once, most of the scientists agreed with his position. Wilde squirmed quite entertainingly, almost enough to make the attack worth it.

Because Q was so used to these sort of attacks, he was able to fake a nonchalance he really didn't feel about the whole thing, making him look far braver than he actually was. It was truly gratifying to have his public persona appear to be a brave and strongwilled man who didn't blink at near-death experiences, rather than the whining coward everyone had thought him on Starbase 56. In his own mind, Q knew he was really the whining coward, but his stock in trade was making people believe he was something he wasn't, and it _was_ quite wonderful how well it worked this time.

The other thing that got him a certain amount of kudos was his methodical destruction of his telepathy amplifier. In the end, he didn't ask T'Laren to lend him moral support; the desire to use the thing was entirely overwhelmed by the fear that someone would use it against _him_, as tr'Sahlassiu nearly had. He simply marched in there and started taking the thing apart. While few people openly praised him for this, Q was fairly sensitive to the image he was projecting, and well aware that to Federation minds, the idea of someone destroying a valuable technology to keep it out of the hands of someone who might misuse it was heroic. All in all, the boost to his image and the ego support he got more or less wiped out the feelings of despondency from yesterday. He just shoved aside and refused to think of his despair at the Continuum's disregard for his well-being, as he'd had to do most of his human life in order to keep functioning, and as for T'Laren, well who needed her to get all soppy with him anyway? She was hired help, and it wasn't his job to be nice to her-- rather it was _hers_ to bolster _him_, and that was the way it should be, and that was the end of the matter.

T'Laren tried to draw him out, to talk to him about it, that night, but he had no desire to talk to her. He'd rendered himself quite vulnerable enough as it was. So he was flippant and cruel, and eventually she got the idea and stopped pestering him.

The next day, after modifications were complete, the probe was launched. The entire symposium ground to a halt; no one could really motivate themselves to do anything other than wait eagerly for the results, Q included. After so long waiting, it was almost an anticlimax when the probe returned-- almost, but not quite.

Everything Q had speculated was true. The probe had identified a quasar on the other side of the barrier, a quasar whose energy output seemed to be channelled almost entirely into a series of devices orbiting the quasar. There was also a planet, which, judging from the lights visible on its nightside, the hardware orbiting it, and the sensor logs showing a great deal of replicator-and-transporter type matter/energy conversions going on on its surface, was obviously the home to a technologically advanced civilization. Further, the sensor logs showed that the people were humanoid, and that they had warp-capable ships-- pointless things to own, if it were impossible for humanoids to cross the barrier, but since they owned them and they were humanoid, it was excellent evidence that it *was* possible for humanoids to safely cross.

Excitement erupted throughout the ship. Suddenly, what had been a dry scientific conference, of interest only to those with the background in physics to follow it, had become a first contact situation. Speculation ran rampant as to who was going to get to go.

Q insisted that, since the whole thing had been his idea in the first place, he should be allowed to accompany the contact party. Wilde shot him down. "This might be a dangerous situation. We don't know if the people on the other side of the barrier are friendly or hostile."

"I've been making contact with new alien species since before your people crawled out of the mud," Q retorted.

"Yes, and we all know how many friends you made in the process," Wilde said shortly. "Besides, aside from the fact that you're not trained, you don't know what you're doing and you're likely to offend the locals and get the party killed, you're entirely too valuable to the Federation to risk on a mission like this, Q."

"You're letting people like Sovaz and Roth go."

"Both Sovaz and Roth are Starfleet officers, and Sovaz is in fact a science officer of this vessel."

"Elejani Baíi isn't a Starfleet officer."

Wilde sighed. "No, she's not. She's an empath, though, and she's been on first contact teams as a civilian specialist before."

"So you're saying she's not as valuable as me? That the Federation is more concerned with its pursuit of material gain than the safety of its civilians? After all, if it's dangerous for _me_, certainly it's dangerous for her as well."

"She's a lot less likely to alienate the locals than you are. And she's more likely to be useful."

"More likely to be _useful?_ I might _know_ these people."

"Wasn't it you who said that the barrier was probably put up to keep out people like the Q?" Wilde wasn't quite smirking, but Q was sure he wanted to. "Your knowing these people is probably not the good thing you'd think."

So it was decided. Sovaz, Roth, Elejani Baíi, Wilde himself, Washington and a few security guards, and a few first contact specialists and anthropologists from the science department would all get to go, and Q would have to be stuck here, even though they would never have discovered this new alien race without his help. It was very depressing. He sulked ostentatiously and took it out on people like Yalit, who really deserved to be abused every chance he got anyway.

* * *

This was the last straw.

Yalit had gotten very, very tired of Q. Tired of his posturing, tired of his denigrating her, tired of the fact that everyone hung on the man's every word as if it were solid latinum. And the fact that he had just achieved such triumph, that he had successfully predicted the nature of the Anomaly, that was only salt on the wound.

She had spent her life humbling men who underestimated her. She'd seduced her sons away from their fathers, twisting them around her finger as a beloved protection against a society which called her less than a man. She'd schemed and plotted and brought men down with their own pleasures, offering forbidden enjoyments and then extorting money and power out of the men who'd tasted the forbidden fruit. She was very likely the most powerful Ferengi woman in existence, and she did _not_ take this sort of treatment from human males who thought they were gods.

"Barak!" she commanded her grandson. "Do you have that report I asked you for yet?"

"Yes, grandmother," he said eagerly, handing her the data crystal. "It's all there."

Yalit popped it into the viewer and pored over it. Damned if the human wasn't telling the truth. He _was_ worth a small moon to the Federation. A smile grew across her face uncontrollably.

_I wonder how much he'd be worth on the open market?..._

* * *

The first contact team returned three days later.

The conference had essentially been derailed. People were spending the days talking about their pet theories about everything, since Q had more or less revealed the secret of the singularity. Q took great pleasure in sitting back and making fun of the various theories, but it wasn't as much fun as it had been to actually discover something on his own and then hold court as he imparted the knowledge to his faithful acolytes. There had also been a pleasure in the act of discovery, something he hadn't known for millennia. Most of the things he'd discovered as a human hadn't been at all pleasurable to learn about.

He was easily as psyched as everyone else when the contact team came back. Rumors flew even before they could make their debriefing, rumors about a highly advanced race on the other side of the barrier. By the time the actual debriefing was held, Q was intensely curious about the species, and why they would have built the barrier in the first place.

"They call themselves the Mihara," Sovaz explained, having been chosen as the person to give the contact team's report to the conference and any other interested civilians. "In their language, it means something like 'those who follow the holy one.' Apparently, approximately 300 years ago, a member of a highly advanced alien race came among them and began to teach them things, mostly concepts of advanced physics and philosophy." She displayed a picture of the aliens without following this up, making Q want to throttle her. "There are actually three separate alien races among the Mihara. The primary race, in terms of percentage of population, is the Nator." The image was of a humanoid, resembling a cross between a Metraxan and a Betazoid-- a man with white skin, not the pinkish color humans often called white but true white, and huge dark bottomless eyes. "Nator are telepaths, and require the presence of other Nator to survive." With a shock Q realized where he'd seen those people before. They were proto-Borg-- the beings the Borg had been before the Borg had turned to technology and a uni-mind. How the hell had they gotten here? The Borg originally hailed from the Delta Quadrant-- a long way away.

"Second are the Sarrin." The image shown was of a very tall, slender not-quite-humanoid-- the general pattern was humaniform, but the neck was elongated and entirely too thin, the skin was deep gold, the eyes were long and thin and solid black, and the joints did not look articulated. They weren't articulated-- Q knew of the Sarrin, and knew their entire bodies were cartilaginous. He broke into a sweat, suddenly very anxious as he remembered where he knew the Sarrin from. "They are also telepaths. While there aren't many Sarrin, they seem to form most of the original population of Mihara, and the language all the Mihara speak is based on theirs. Sarrin are low-gravity dwellers, as you can see; their population is most dense on the second planet in orbit around the quasar, a small planet where the gravity is .43 gees. On the main Mihara homeworld, the third planet, gravitation is .79 gees, and the Sarrin can move about there with about the same difficulty that humans experience on worlds with a gee of 2 to 2.5. Some Sarrin wear exoskeleton prosthetics to help them move about."

"Are you all right?" T'Laren asked Q.

"I recognize them, that's all. I didn't think I'd see one of them again."

"What are they? Are they dangerous to you?"

"The Sarrin? No, they're not dangerous to anyone. They evolved from herbivores with no natural enemies; they haven't the foggiest idea how to use violence. I thought they'd quarantined themselves on their homeworld to prevent more violent species from finding them." He was very much afraid he might know why this group of Sarrin would have left.

"The third race are the Yvo." An image of a lovely, androgynous but apparently male being who looked exactly like a human, with hair down to his ankles, appeared. "The Yvo are humanoid hermaphrodites; most of the time they look more male than female, but when pregnant, they develop pronounced female secondary sexual characteristics. Children are furred; once fully mature, adults have hair only on the tops of their heads, where it is considered a secondary sexual characteristic and a determinant of sexual attractiveness. Some caution should be taken in dealing with the Yvo, for humans and other races who are very similar in appearance to humans; the Yvo will judge obvious aliens by different criteria, but for any aliens who resemble Yvo, they apply their own cultural rules regarding physical appearance. As a result, bald humanoids are considered powerless, sexually unattractive and fit only to be followers, while humanoids with facial hair are considered childlike. The Yvo instinct to protect pregnant Yvo also makes it difficult for humanoid women, who mostly appear to be pregnant to the Yvo, to perform any task that involves physical danger anywhere near an Yvo. The Nator do not appear to have difficulties in dealing with the Yvo, but Nator coloration is strikingly distinct from standard humanoid coloration, and therefore the Yvo may not consider them to look enough like Yvo to evoke their cultural standards."

"Right. So we all shave our faces, bind our breasts, and make sure we're wearing big wigs when we talk to them," Q muttered. "How long is she going to dwell on this?"

"Q, she's giving a briefing about aliens and dealing with them. It seems like she's saying that the Yvo are harder to deal with than the other two races."

"Yes, yes, I got all that. Why doesn't she just--" He silenced himself as he realized what Sovaz had moved on to.

"--credited their scientific and philosophical advances to an ancient being, presumed to originally come from some far older race, who came originally to the Sarrin in the form of one of their own people. This individual is the spiritual leader, and in some senses a secular power as well, of all the Mihara. She is referred to as the High Magister Azi Martikale. Apparently she came to the Sarrin homeworld 300 years ago..."

300 years ago. 300 years ago and he could still remember it as if it had only happened a few weeks ago. The world spun around Q. He wouldn't have recognized the name Martikale without the context, though now he recalled it as the name of her mortal lover. But he knew the name Azi. It was the name she had gone by to the man she'd thrown immortality away for. He could more easily remember that, the last name she'd taken, than he could remember most of his own names.

Azi was alive.

He got up suddenly, the world still swaying around him, icewater and lava alternating in his veins. He was going to be sick. He had to get out of here. Q staggered toward the door, ignoring T'Laren's concern and the eyes of all on him. Azi was alive, alive, and she was there, he could even have spoken to her if he'd gone with the team, he could send her a message if he chose, run so far and so fast away, forbidden to think of her, and now she was right there within reach and he was definitely going to throw up. He managed to make it to the nearest rest room, and spent the next several minutes vomiting up everything he'd eaten in the past twelve hours.

Q leaned his head against the wall, trembling, as the toilet's automatic purge cycle ran and disposed of everything he'd just dumped into it. He had feared this, the moment he'd seen the picture of the Sarrin. Azi was a Sarrin, now. Had been one for 300 years, just as he'd been human for three. He remembered her, remembered the graceful body she had worn, remembered how her head had snapped back and forth on its stalklike neck in the Sarrin expression of hysterical distress as she knelt on the ground, her robes covered in mud, pleading with him... no. No no no. He wouldn't remember that. And he wouldn't remember the pain he had felt when Azi had betrayed him, when she'd attacked him savagely and... no. No, he wouldn't remember any of it. Q got up shakily and went to the sink, intending to rinse his mouth out with water as he put the memories out of his head, as he'd done so many times before.

But this time they wouldn't go. He clutched at the sink, overwhelmed by a wave of memory and overpowering grief. He couldn't breathe. Tears blurred his vision, a sob was caught in his throat, choking him, and all he could see was Azi, Azi as she'd been when they'd both been in the Continuum, his best friend, closer to him than ever two humans could get to one another, so entwined around his life and he hers that he sometimes felt she was his reason for existing, that he was created to take care of her, and he heard her voice screaming again as her head rocked back and forth and heard his own pitiless replies, and the dam broke. Q wailed. He dropped to his knees, huddled into a fetal position on the bathroom floor and sobbed hysterically, brokenly, unable to make the memories go away the way he had when he'd still been in the Continuum, the way they'd gone away for 300 years.

The rest room door opened, and T'Laren entered. She crossed the room quickly, without saying anything to him, and knelt beside him, wrapping her arms around him. Q clung to her, more by the instincts buried in his human body than any conscious realization that she was offering comfort. He pressed his face into her shirt, his sobs muffled by her breasts. She rocked him slightly, stroking his hair and murmuring that it was all right, even though it wasn't, even though it could never be.

As the sobs subsided, he realized where he was. A wave of embarrassment overtook him. "Are you aware that this is the men's room?" he asked T'Laren, in a pale imitation of his best sardonic voice.

"Let's get you back to the room," she said. "I know a route where we shouldn't run into anyone."

He got to his feet and splashed water on his face. "Did you make excuses for me at the briefing?"

"I said you weren't feeling well. Obvious enough."

"Not good enough. They're all going to be talking about me."

"They have plenty of other things to talk about."

She guided him around the corner and through a side corridor. They passed an occasional crew member, but no one Q knew, before they reached the room.

"Do you want to talk about it?" T'Laren asked him.

"Why would I want to talk about it?"

"It's clear that whatever happened between you and this Azi Martikale, it's extremely upsetting to you. You are probably going to hear her name come up in conversation again, Q. It's unavoidable. If you break down like this every time you hear her name--"

"I am _not_ going to break down every time I hear her name!" he shouted. "I don't want to talk about it, T'Laren. The case is closed!"

She shook her head. "Q, you just staggered out of a briefing and broke down in hysterics in the bathroom. That is not normal behavior for you. I have never seen you affected so strongly or so violently by anything, and based on the strength of this reaction, I honestly do not think you can control yourself on this topic. You are going to have to discuss it at some point."

"No I don't."

"I don't mean to push. But it seems to me that of late, you've been unwilling to discuss anything with me. You have been flip and dismissive any time I attempt to bring up the telepathic assault we both recently suffered, you have ignored my advice on dealing with others, in fact we haven't had a serious discussion about you and your feelings since we began work on the telepathic amplifier, with the exception of a brief discussion of the impact of such an amplifier's existence on you. My only value as your therapist exists in proportion with your willingness to talk to me. If you are not willing to talk--"

"--then you'd have to get a real job, wouldn't you?"

"I consider this to be a real job."

"Yes, that's exactly it. It's really your _job._" He began to pace. "Stalwart T'Laren, the calm and rational Vulcan, can force herself to spend time dealing with the problems of someone she probably couldn't really care less about, because it's her job. And we all know how big Vulcans and Starfleet officers are on doing their duty."

"You feel that I don't care about you personally?"

"Well, how am I supposed to avoid it? Every time I turn around you're saying 'Oh no, Q, we're not friends. I'm just your therapist.' It's hardly calculated to reassure me of your undying love."

"I _am_ your therapist, Q. That doesn't mean I don't care about you personally. It simply means that 'friends' is not a good description of our relationship."

"Because people choose to be friends. You're stuck with me because of some debt you owe to Lhoviri."

"That is not the major reason--"

"But it is _a_ reason. You just admitted it."

"The main reason we are not friends is that friends implies a level of reciprocity which our relationship doesn't have. I am here to help you, not the other way around."

"Exactly!"

"Does that bother you?"

"What do you mean, does it bother me? Of _course_ it doesn't bother me. Why should it bother me that here I am, pouring my heart out to someone who doesn't really have any _personal_ reason to listen to it aside from some obligation to my brother, when you can't be bothered to share the tiniest bit of your own feelings with me?"

"I'm here for you to talk to about _your_ feelings and problems. You aren't here for mine."

"You say that like it's written in stone. As if our roles were cast by the gods the moment we were created, and never shall they deviate from what is written. I can tell you from personal experience, T'Laren, the gods are not into that. They could care less if people deviated from their roles."

"Q, this has nothing to do with gods or a belief that things cannot change. All I am saying is that I was hired as your therapist. This by necessity means I have to maintain a certain amount of emotional distance. You can't talk to me about your problems if I am one of your problems. I am supposed to be a sounding board, a mirror of sorts, allowing you to see yourself more clearly. The more you perceive me as another person in your environment, the less you'd be able to see yourself through me. And I realize I may have let things go too far in that direction. The very fact that you think I _should_ be telling you about my problems indicates I've let the boundaries stray."

He shook his head. "You think it would do me any good at all to know someone who isn't a person to me, just something that echoes my own words back at me?"

"The analogy isn't exact. I don't echo your words back at you, I give you guidance and advice so that you can see the things that are hidden from you in your current perspective-- the way others see you, or some aspects of your own feelings."

Q waved his hands. "I don't care about the analogy. That isn't my point. Years and years ago, someone suggested I go see someone who was supposed to do exactly what you're saying you're supposed to do. So fine, I didn't see her as a person. I saw her as a self-righteous prig. It didn't work at all well."

"Just because a previous therapy attempt didn't work is no reason to dismiss the entire concept."

"It isn't therapy I need!" he exploded.

"Then what is it you need?"

But that was too much. That was admitting to her what it was he desperately longed for, what he knew now he'd never get from her. "It's too late for you not to be one of my problems, T'Laren. So fine. You're fired."

"What?"

"You heard me. I just fired you. You're not my therapist anymore."

"You can't do that."

"I most certainly can."

"I mean-- of course you can, that was poorly worded. But you would be foolish to. You need me, Q. Or you need someone like me, who can view you objectively and help you to understand yourself. Otherwise you're going to end up in the situation you were in on Starbase 56."

"What I _need_ is not someone who tolerates me because it's their job!" He spun on her. "Maybe I needed that once. When you got me off Starbase 56, I was so convinced misery was an integral part of being human that I had no way to _see_ what it was I needed. I'd never needed anything like it before, and I'd have laughed hysterically at any Q who did, and I was so far from having it that I couldn't even imagine what it would be like. But I know what it is I need, now, and someone who has to 'maintain emotional distance' is _not_ it."

"So what is it you need?"

"You're fired, remember? I don't have to tell you."

"Is it love?"

He laughed harshly. "Don't be a moron, T'Laren. Can you see me getting all mushily romantic over anyone? Or pining away because there's no _luuuv_ in my life? And _if_ I needed it, I'd be, in a word, screwed, since there's no chance I could ever get anyone to love me. No, my needs are much simpler. And almost-- _almost_\-- attainable." He stared darkly at the wall.

"You want a friend."

"This isn't Twenty Questions. I fired you. Go away."

She walked over to him. "I thought Markow was your friend."

He snorted. "Oh, Markow. I think we may have discussed something that wasn't physics and wasn't word games for our personal amusement _once_." Q turned to look at her. "Is it so much to ask that there be someone in the universe who gives a damn whether I live or die?"

"Of course not. But you already have that. Markow, Roth and Elejani Baíi all appear to care about you personally. _I_ care, regardless of whether or not you 'fire' me."

"Markow can't admit to himself that he doesn't have any real friends either. He'd shove my death to the back of his brain where he keeps stuff like how much he wants to walk again and how much he hates the fact that he never will because of his own stupid mistake. Frankly, he's even better at it than I am, and I'm talented enough at self-deception that I managed not to think about Azi for 300 years." His voice cracked. Angrily he said, "I need something to drink," and stomped over to the replicator.

"If your throat hurts from dehydration, I'd suggest fruit juice."

"Yeah yeah. One of those orange passionfruit juice concoctions," he ordered, and then changed his mind. "With a shot of synthevodka."

"Is that wise?"

"It's synthehol. What's it going to do, get me drunk? I'll just think poof, I'm not drunk. Maybe I'll snap my fingers," he said sarcastically.

"Just because Markow cannot admit to you that he cares for you is not a reason to believe he doesn't."

"Oh, I think he does. That's not the point. Markow can't admit to _any_ human weakness, like grieving for a dead friend or his own lost abilities. Rather like a certain starship captain I used to know." He pulled his mind off that particular track. "Roth just wants my body for some reason I can't fathom, and Elejani Baíi thinks I'm a god. None of these people give a damn about _me_." He took a deep swig of his drink. "And _you_ only care about me because it's your job. You'd do the same for anyone. And I don't want that. So you're fired." He took another. "So now you don't have to pretend that you care anymore. Go get on with your life. Make googly eyes at Tris. I don't care."

"You're distraught. I don't think this is a good time to make a decision like this."

"I think now is the perfect time. I'm tired of you. I'm tired of you prying and interfering in my life."

"It sounds to me like the real reason you're upset is that you feel that I don't care about you as a person. That simply isn't true. I became involved in your life in the first place because I was hired as your therapist, yes. But while I'm capable of working with someone I dislike or am indifferent toward, I could not have done the sort of intensive work we did for three weeks on _Ketaya_ if I'd had no personal caring for you whatsoever. I _am_ concerned for you as a person. I care about your welfare. I want to see you as happy as it's possible for you to be, not simply because it is my job to do so, but because it's something I personally want to see."

"But you aren't interested in letting me have any impact on _your_ life."

"What sort of impact did you want? You've said this isn't about wanting love. You've also said you don't want to be sexually involved with anyone, including me, so I assume that isn't it. What did you actually _want?_"

"Does it matter?"

"Of course it matters."

He stared at the wall for several moments, trying to decide if he did actually want to admit to this, and, if he did, to muster up the courage for it. Finally he drank the rest of his drink in two gulps and set it down. "You don't need me for anything."

"I see."

"Like when we were attacked by the Romulan." It was easier to get the words out now that he'd started. "You went on this whole thing with Tris about how you felt like you'd failed me. Did it ever occur to you to ask _me_ if you'd failed me?"

She blinked at him. "The answer would have been yes," she said. "Why should I have asked?"

"The answer would _not_ have been yes! You didn't even _ask!_ How do you know what the answer would have been?"

"Because I _did_ fail. Regardless of whether I could have been reasonably expected to succeed or not, the fact remains that I failed to protect you." Her voice had a slight brittle edge to it. "I did not need you to tell me what I already knew. And if you had not answered the question 'yes', it would only be because you didn't understand the situation." T'Laren looked up at him. "Is that what you want? You've several times implied that you wish to give me advice, that you want to know personal details about my life. Have you cast yourself in your mind as some sort of potential confidante, and it upsets you that I don't turn to you for such?"

"Why would that upset me?" he asked savagely. "Who would want to be entangled in your idiotic little personal problems anyway? I don't need you or anyone to be bothering me with their petty little emotional problems. I'd be an idiot to want something like that."

"So that's it," she said. "You are upset because no one turns to you as a confidante. Despite the fact that anyone who did so would be taking their heart into their hands, since you would most likely be flippant, or cruel, or make any other number of inappropriate reactions--"

"How do you know? No one ever _has_. So how do you know how I'd react?"

"The way you reacted when you saw how upset I was at Sovaz' presence, and Tris' questions, when we first came aboard _Yamato_. You gloated that you'd found a weakness in me."

"I did not."

"Does it matter? That was my perception. If I had turned to you after the assault we both endured, and I'd told you how miserable I felt for failing you, I felt it very likely that you'd respond with something like 'And well you should.' I did not need to hear that right then. I needed someone supportive to talk to, someone who hadn't just been torn apart by the experience himself and who didn't have a history of making fun of people when they are in pain."

"You think that's all I am, don't you? All I know how to do is make fun of people. I have no higher emotions, no capacity for sympathy whatsoever."

"I would certainly say you're one of the least empathic people I know."

"Then why _would_ you care about me? You're saying I'm a selfish monster. Why would that be the sort of person you'd care about, for any reason other than you're being hired to do it?"

"I'm not saying you're a selfish monster--"

"Yes you are. And I don't want to discuss this anymore. Get out."

"Q, this is not a constructive way of--"

"I don't want to _hear_ it! No more psychobabble, no more therapist-speak, no more of you pretending you care so very much about me when you don't. You couldn't. No one could. You said it yourself-- I make fun of people in pain, I have no empathy for other people's problems, everything is me, me, me. So get out."

"These are also my quarters," she pointed out.

"Oh, of course. Easily rectified." He stalked into her bedroom. Foolish of her to leave it unlocked, Vulcan tradition or no. Once there, he started scooping up her things-- she really had brought very little, since she relied on replicators, and carried it to the door of the suite. He dumped it in the hall and went back for a second load.

"I will do my own packing," she said sharply. "You've made your wishes clear."

"Good. I'm so glad that for once I have."

"I suggest you take a nap; you're still clearly overwrought. We'll discuss this tomorrow."

"We'll do no such thing. I fired you, remember?"

Her voice was hard. "_You_ did not hire me, therefore you do not have the right to fire me. And I refuse to stand by and allow you to self-destruct over an issue like this."

"Throwing you out is self-destruction? It feels more like self-preservation to me."

"Preservation from _what?_ Have I hurt your feelings so, by not running to you with my problems? If so, that itself is a problem we need to work on. Or you need to work on, with somebody."

"If I hire myself another therapist will you consider yourself fired? Or will you just keep stalking me?"

"I'll consider myself fired now. At the moment I am not speaking as a therapist." She stood in front of him, her face composed into the cold mask that meant she was angry. Good. She should be angry. "You claim you don't need therapy. You say you do not want to be with someone who is not a close personal friend. So what will you do, become a hermit? You _have_ no close personal friends. Why is it so deeply offensive to you that I should not turn to you for emotional support that you must take my belongings and throw them in the corridor?"

"Because!" How could she be so dense? "No one _else_ _pretends_ to care about me! No one--" He felt a sob well up, and forced it down. "It doesn't matter. Just get out."

"It matters," she said implacably. "Why now? Why has this suddenly boiled over in you?"

"_You_ want to know about Azi. To _help_ me," he sneered. "But you won't tell me a single, solitary fact about yourself. You faked your own death, or else you nearly died and didn't tell your family you'd lived-- why? Why were you so vicious to Sovaz? What do you owe Lhoviri? You haven't told me any of this."

"It's not your business. I've told no one any of this."

"But you expect _me_ to rip out my heart and hand it to you on a platter! You want me to tell you about Azi? You want to know all the gory details, want to know how much of a monster I really am? Well, you're not going to get it by telling me 'oh, this is therapeutic, Q.' I went to someone else who wanted me to tell her the details because it would be _therapeutic_ and I was supposed to get it off my chest, and the very little I told her convinced her that I was a monster and she had to hurt me, humiliate me in front of my people, _betray_ me, _lie_ to me--"

"Guinan."

"Yes! Guinan the perfect, Guinan the sweet, Guinan the ancient and wise. I went to her for help and she _spat_ on me. So you can see why I'd be reluctant to tell anyone else who thinks it might be _therapeutic_. And the more I think about it, the more I think I don't want therapy anyway. I don't want someone to listen to my problems because they're paid to do it. I _want_ someone to care, and if no one cares, which no one does, then I don't want to tell anyone anything. You could tear me to shreds with what you already know, and what do I know about you?"

"I wouldn't tear you to shreds. I thought you trusted me better than that."

"I trusted the entire Q Continuum for millions of years, and look how _that_ turned out."

T'Laren nodded slowly. "And that's why you feel you can't confide in me? You have nothing to hold over my head, to blackmail me with if I hurt you, and you cannot trust that I won't hurt you?"

"Everyone else who knows me really well has betrayed me," he said blackly. "Why not you?"

"All right," she said suddenly.

"'All right'? What's all right? What are you talking about?"

"I... cannot bear that you would not trust me, that you would throw me entirely out of your life, let me in neither as therapist nor as friend, because you don't have sufficient blackmail material. If, after knowing the truth, you choose to throw me out because of what you'd then know, that is only what I would deserve. If you wish to know the worst thing I have ever done, the greatest horror I know myself to be capable of... I will tell you." She sat down on the couch.

He followed her, but did not sit. "Why would you do that?"

"Because I wish to remain a part of your life. If this is your price, I will pay it."

"You think you can buy my trust?"

"Isn't that exactly what you said you wanted me to do?"

Q shook his head, and sat down next to her. "T'Laren... you don't _have_ to tell me anything. I'm quite sure I'll say or do something that makes matters worse, when you're done. Keep your secrets."

She raised an eyebrow. "Then I am unfired?"

"No, you're still fired. I told you I don't need a therapist." He took a deep breath. "If... you want to stick around, though, I won't stop you. Just as long as you understand the rules have changed. I'm not your patient. You don't have the authority to tell me what to do, what to eat, when to sleep, what drugs not to take, any of that. Give me advice, and maybe I'll take it. But we're equals. Do you understand?"

"I believe the word you are looking for is 'friends'," she said.

He smiled sardonically. "I've used that word way too many times tonight. People are going to think I've gone soft."

She nodded, and looked away, toward the far wall.

"It was two years ago," she said softly.

* * *

It was difficult to say this, difficult to begin. But if the alternative was letting Q throw her out, decide he didn't trust her any longer, and most likely get himself killed, she had to do something.

"I said you didn't need to--"

"I know," T'Laren said. It didn't matter if he said she didn't need to tell him. It was clear to her that she did, that he was entirely too frightened and mistrustful, and she couldn't quite understand why. He'd been willing to tell her almost anything, in the past. Why the sudden panic?

Perhaps it had something to do with what he'd said about Guinan. If she truly had hurt him when he'd gone to her for help on this issue in the past, then this issue coming up again might have reminded him of the dangers of trust. Or, perhaps, it was a cumulative effect. Or something triggered by the incident with the Romulan. In any case, she didn't think this would simply go away. She had to deal with it, and it seemed that the only way left to her was to tell him what she had thought she would never tell anyone.

"It was two years ago," she repeated. "Maybe a little more, when it began. It was after I'd come back from my mission to the Romulan Empire." T'Laren stared into nothing, remembering. "That mission...changed me. In many ways. And when I returned, I felt that my life as a Vulcan might be empty; that perhaps there should be more to my life than duty and discipline."

"Very astute of you."

She shook her head. "Not necessarily. What I had realized... was that I was missing a significant portion of possible experience by choosing to be Vulcan, but even more particularly, by being married to my husband. Soram... was a traditionalist." She looked at Q. "Vulcans are bonded to their mates in childhood, by tradition. Some Vulcans feel the tradition is outdated, and that an adult can make a better, more logical choice of mate by choosing from a pool of fellow adults than a parent can make by comparing two children, who have not yet shown how much of their potential they will realize. Soram's parents believed this."

"That's why Sovaz is unbonded."

"She told you this?"

"More or less. She said you and Soram got each others' names out of the Vulcan equivalent of a dating service."

"I am sure Sovaz did not say that."

"Well. Maybe 'dating service' is my own interpretation," Q said, grinning.

"I would think so. The Marriage Registry exists to help Vulcans who are unbonded as adults to find compatible mates. Since I had been raised on Earth, by humans, I had never had an opportunity to be bonded. So when I went to Vulcan to live with my father's cousin, it was suggested that I add my name to the Registry so that at some future date I could find a bondmate. And Soram seemed ideal. Both of us wished to go into Starfleet; he was a traditionalist who knew the disciplines well, and could help me to understand what it meant to be Vulcan, or so I thought, and I could help him in the interacting with humans that is required of any Vulcan entering Starfleet."

"This sounds rather like a recipe for disaster."

"Does it? I still think it sounds perfectly reasonable... it merely did not work out so well."

"I'm finding it hard to imagine you in a decent relationship with a traditionalist Vulcan."

"At the time, I thought I could achieve full Vulcan discipline if only it was reinforced strongly enough." She looked away. "For the most part, we had little difficulties. Soram attempted to correct my non-Vulcan behaviors, and I accepted it. On some issues, I would not be moved, and there he eventually accepted that. It wasn't until after I returned from the Romulan Empire that I realized what was wrong."

"What was wrong?"

This was the difficult part. How was she supposed to tell Q, of all people, what had happened after that? "I... realized... certain things were missing from my life. Things that I had never known, and realized now that I had experienced them that I needed them."

"For example? You're being rather excessively vague, don't you think?"

"For example... what do you know of Vulcan biology?"

"Not much... Vulcans bored me silly when I was omnipotent, if you must know. I know you can't be entirely dissimilar to other humanoids, since Vulcan/human crosses exist."

"Our... sexuality is very different from human. Vulcans... every seven Earth years, approximately, which translates to two of our own, a Vulcan male will endure... a mating cycle. That is... he becomes incapable of thinking about much else. And if he does not, during this time, mate with someone and establish a telepathic bond with them, he will die."

"That's the most ludicrous piece of evolutionary nonsense I've ever heard. Did someone experiment with you people in your racial infancy, or are you just incredibly unlucky?"

"The need to mate or die appears linked to the genes that control telepathy. So evolutionarily, telepathy must have conveyed enough of an advantage that the trait did not die out."

"I definitely don't remember this. The idea of Vulcan men running around desperate for sex strikes me as the kind of thing I would have thought amusing enough to remember."

"It might be amusing to outsiders. It is hardly amusing to live through it. A man suffering from the mating cycle is, for all intents and purposes, insane. Imagine what it would be to have one's control over one's own actions stripped away by an overpowering biological need."

Q seemed to consider that. "I suppose it would be less amusing from that perspective, yes. What about the women?"

"Females don't enter pon farr unless they are bonded; our bodies can produce the correct neurotransmitters but we lack the internal cycle men do. As a result of all this, all Vulcan males must be bonded, and Vulcans generally do not choose to mate outside of the cycle."

"Ah." He nodded. "You told me that."

"While in the Romulan Empire, I was... forced is a bad term... I found it expedient to allow myself to be seduced, to preserve my cover. My identity was as one of Melor's subordinates, and I felt that, if I turned him down, he might grow angry at me and see my flaws more clearly, including flaws in my disguise. If I allowed him to court and finally win me, he would remain blinded by lust."

"What a manipulative little schemer you are. I love it."

"That, I do not particularly regret; I have regrets about what happened later, but that isn't germane to this. I... I had had sexual experiences as a child on Terra. Humans rarely remain virginal much past sixteen; I experimented with a close friend when I was fifteen, but Vulcans aren't actually sexually mature at that age, even though we look like human adolescents. What pleasure I derived from it was mostly from my unfocused telepathy picking up on my friend's pleasure. And I had enjoyed Soram's times, when they came, but it had never occurred to me that sex outside the times was possible or would be enjoyable. Melor taught me otherwise. And it wasn't merely sex. Romulans are allowed to express their feelings far more so than Vulcans, and in truth, are allowed to feel more. Melor, whom I betrayed in the end, was kinder and more loving to me than Soram ever could be. When I returned from Romulus, I realized that in coming back to my true life, I was giving up the freedom I'd had as a Romulan, the freedom I'd had as a child-- to use discipline when it suited me to do so, and to feel when I wished to feel. And it seemed a remarkably empty way to live my life, to lose those freedoms."

"It would be. I can't imagine why you'd want to."

"But all my identity was tied up with being a Vulcan. For a while, I considered leaving Soram-- I was in love with Tris, and he with me, and he could give me what Soram could not. But the only way to obtain a divorce is to call challenge at the time of mating, which would kill Soram or else kill my champion, or to prove that Soram was abusive, a criminal or insane. He was none of these things. I could only leave him by leaving my Vulcan identity behind."

"You couldn't just pack up and leave?"

"Our bond needed to be formally broken, and that could happen only if I became Kolinahru or went into exile. Otherwise, if the bond was not broken, Soram would die at his next time and take me with him. And I was not willing to go into exile; I still wished to be Vulcan, yet I found myself chafing more and more at the requirements of being Vulcan. I wanted to create a kind of Vulcanness that walked between worlds, a synthesis of Vulcan and Romulan that chose the best of both." She stared at the floor darkly. "Instead I was consumed. Over the course of a year, perhaps, I became less and less able to control my emotions. They flared at inappropriate times. I laughed during briefings, cried during departures for away missions, flew into rages when minor things went wrong. I managed to control myself when I was counseling, but at other times I could not. My... sex drive... was equally out of control; I picked up strange men in bars on every shore leave planet I went to--"

"And your husband didn't know about this?"

"He knew. Of course he knew, he was bonded to me. But he could not give me sexual release, and they could. As long as I did not bond with them, he allowed it, and I loved him desperately for making such concessions for me. I flew back and forth between extremes of emotion, and through it I clung to Soram, considering him my anchor of sanity.

"I was discharged from Starfleet, and sent home to Vulcan, to Soram's family's home. They recognized-- Starfleet recognized-- that Vulcans heal better from mental illness when treated by fellow Vulcans, in the privacy of the ancestral home. A mindhealer was sent to me, and tried to assist me, but I was madly out of control by then and could neither summon the discipline to follow the mindhealer's instructions nor the desire to. I was waiting for Soram's next time of mating; I was sure it would bring us closer together, would bridge the gap between us in our minds. Soram had taken to shutting me out, which I understood; no one wants to share his mind with a madwoman. But I longed for that connection, and I knew, when his time came, he would need to open his mind to me.

"He came home at the proper time, and we shared his time together. And then, a week afterward, when I had begun to believe I had some hope of pulling my mind back together, he--"

Her voice caught, and she couldn't go on. "What did he do?" Q asked, his voice serious, not quite sympathetic but certainly not the flippancy or pushiness she'd have expected from him.

"He... I cannot speak of this, Q. I cannot."

"Isn't it you who always said to me that things need to be brought out into the open before you can deal with them?"

"I've _dealt_ with it! I had Lhoviri change it so it didn't happen, and still the memory haunts me..."

"Fixing it isn't the same as dealing with it, T'Laren."

She looked at him, startled. "Are you suddenly trained as a counselor?"

Q smiled sardonically. "I've occasionally been called on to give advice to poor primitive beings. It's not my preferred role, but it's one I've done."

"So you are trying to act as what? My guardian angel? My spirit guide?"

"Something like that," he agreed. "So what happened?"

She swallowed, and took a deep breath, trying to focus the disciplines. They had never worked particularly well against this memory, though. "He told me... he was leaving me. Because I was insane. He had sought a divorce, and was enacting it now, since his pon farr was done with and so divorcing me would not require him to find another mate for seven years..."

"Logical."

"I... suppose it is. I have a hard time seeing the logic... I saw that I had sacrificed for him, that I had given up one I loved for him, that I had tried so hard to fit myself into the mold of proper Vulcanhood and it was all for him. I realized much, much later that most of my striving to be a proper Vulcan had never come from within me; it was how I expressed my love for him, my desire to be more like him. At the time, though, I felt... betrayed..."

_Betrayed me, betrayed me, I gave you love and you throw it away, I shelter you once again from the storms within that would kill you, and you throw me aside rather than so shelter me, betrayer, betrayer, you've taken everything from me and I won't let you leave, you will not leave me, never leave me, never ever leave me again_...

"Of course you did. Who wouldn't? That seems particularly heartless, to leave you right after you'd saved his life."

"Yes..." She swallowed. "So I-- I was mad with rage, you understand, I was humiliated and betrayed, and it all raged out of my control-- I remember thinking I would not let him leave, I would _make sure_ he could not leave--"

"You killed him," Q said.

"H-- how did you know?"

Q shook his head. "It's a very old story, T'Laren," he said softly. "I don't mean to belittle you, but you're hardly the first woman to kill the man who was abandoning her."

"But I am _Vulcan!_"

"And Vulcans are biologically one of the most violent, vicious species in existence. If you and the Romulans didn't have such strict societal controls to prevent you from killing yourselves, you would outdo the Klingons for bloody-mindedness. Your disciplines were cracking anyway, you'd been through an emotional upheaval-- at least I assume those mating seasons of yours cause emotional upheaval, I imagine going insane on a regular basis should do that--"

"Yes. It is very much an emotional experience."

"And then he throws you over for being nuts. When it was partially his fault you were having problems. I'd have killed him."

"You are neither a Vulcan nor a pacifist."

"True. And actually, I probably wouldn't have. Q don't... under normal circumstances... ever try to kill one another." His voice dropped darkly, as if some inner pain haunted him. "But Vulcans are not nearly as mentally stable as the Q."

"Mentally stable? I wouldn't have considered that one of the standout features of your race."

"Based on a sample size of what, two? When one's lost everything that meant anything to him? I can see a clear scientific basis for your conclusions." He stretched out an arm along the top of the couch, so her head ended up resting lightly on it. "Tell me what happened."

"I..." She shook her head. "I remember... seeing blood everywhere. And not quite realizing what had happened, where the blood was coming from, until I looked down and saw Soram, and the ceremonial blade I'd brought back from the Romulan Empire in my hands, covered in his blood. And then... then Sovaz came into the room... and she said 'You have killed my brother,' and it was as if I had destroyed everything in her that was innocent and pure... I ran then. I couldn't bear the shame. They captured me, and brought me to healers, who tried to help me find a constructive way to deal with my own guilt and pain... I could not. They were not equipped to handle Starfleet officers who'd been trained for espionage. I escaped, and stole a shuttlecraft. I think I was completely mad then, because all I could think was that the sands of Vulcan would reject me, my ancestral mother would cast me out and I belonged nowhere, nowhere at all but the cold dark of space. And I flung myself into space, and died."

"Died?" Q asked, startled, and then recognition lit his eyes. "Lhoviri."

"Yes. When I awakened, Lhoviri told me that inasmuch as I now existed in linear time at all, I had been dead for over a year. He had brought me back to perform a task for him. And I... I could not bear the thought of living, I could not live when Soram was dead at my hands. I tried to kill myself, again and again. There were times when I succeeded, and he brought me back. Finally he asked me what I would need to keep me from killing myself... and he said he could do anything... so I said I never wanted Soram to have died. I didn't want Lhoviri to bring him back, as he did me; I was not sure I was real, that I was anything other than a soulless construct of Lhoviri's mind. I would not have that for Soram. So I asked that he never be killed, that I never have killed him. And he did it. No one remembers Soram's death any more but me."

Q stared at her. "I am amazed."

"Why?"

"Do you have any idea how much effort it takes to retroactively alter the universe? Even a small change, less than two years old, is incredibly taxing to arrange. Not to mention the effort involved in raising the dead. You actually have to tap into the dimension where the dead go, find them, and if they're not there anymore scan backward through time until you _do_ find them--"

"Do you think he really did it?"

"You look rather not dead to me."

"That isn't what I mean. Is it possible I'm merely a simulacrum he created?"

Q considered. "Possible, but unlikely. Truly self-aware simulacra with a totally independent existence are very hard to do." He frowned. "Frankly, it's a lot more likely that he didn't really revise the universe."

"Why do you think he didn't do it?"

"It's a lot more likely that he implanted the memory of killing Soram in your mind to make you more loyal to him."

T'Laren shook her head. "No."

"It makes more sense. Do you know how many kinds of permission he'd have had to get to retroactively alter the universe that way? The entire Continuum would have to agree to it, and given how cavalier they've been about whether or not I live or die, I just don't think that's likely."

"Lhoviri did not do that to me. I killed Soram. I _know_ this."

"Yes, but _how_ do you know? Lhoviri could just as easily have implanted false memories in your mind; it's easy enough to do, and no one would be able to tell, except another Q of course."

T'Laren sighed. "Q, this seems like the sort of point that belongs in a philosophical argument. I cannot know that Lhoviri did or did not do this; however, the only reality we can perceive is that which our memories supply. I _know_ what happened. If my knowledge is untrue... there is nothing I can do about that."

He sighed. "I just don't want you being blindly loyal to Lhoviri, when he might well have suckered you into this."

"I am hardly blind in my loyalty. But based on what I know, I owe him a great debt. And it is within the power of the Continuum to do as I believe Lhoviri has done, isn't it?"

"Oh, sure, but it's a lot of work and the higher-ups don't tend to like it. You have to get permission from the entire Continuum, as I said."

"Then I have no reason not to believe it happened that way."

"I suppose you'll cling to your beliefs regardless of the evidence; you mortals get like that when religion's at stake. My only point is, I don't want you thinking you're irrevocably bound to me just because Lhoviri fixed the universe for you, because he might not have."

"It doesn't matter. Memory makes up what we are, Q. If someone had implanted a memory in me of something I know I could not do, of something completely out of character, I would know it and recognize that there was something wrong. Even if I had no way to distinguish that memory from my other memories, still I would know that I could not have done this thing. But... it was a part of me. If Lhoviri implanted the memory, it was still a thing I could have done. As difficult as it is to bear, as much as I wish it was not a part of my character... I know, now, that I am capable of murdering the one I most love."

"That must be a very difficult thing to know," Q said quietly. "Especially for someone who prides herself on her pacifism and emotional control. But what you have to understand, T'Laren, is that _all_ mortals have these dark little secrets. Give almost any mortal the right circumstances, and they'll strike down their best friends, or betray, or commit rape, or any number of morally reprehensible acts. I... almost think that might apply to any sentient being, mortal or no. If you were in control of yourself, you wouldn't have done it. But the loss of your inhibitions against emotional expression reduced you to your biology, and your biology insists that you kill anything that might be a threat. Someone you love abandoning you is a threat."

"And this is supposed to excuse me? Other Vulcans suffer from loss of emotional control, sometimes. They do not murder their bondmate."

"No," Q said. "Nothing excuses you. But you have to recognize what the reasons were. If you go about thinking, 'Oh, I'm such an evil person and that's why I did this,' it doesn't prevent you from doing it again, or overcompensating in areas where you shouldn't." He shrugged. "Accept what you're capable of, understand why you're capable of it, and keep yourself from falling into the situation again. And stop blaming yourself. You've fixed the problem. Soram isn't dead anymore."

This was a very different side of Q than T'Laren had seen previously. He still wasn't dripping with emotional support and sympathy, but he was, for Q, being very sympathetic-- and his advice actually made sense. It was easy to forget, in the midst of his whining and his posturing and his cluelessness about the human condition, that he was really an incredibly ancient entity with thousands of lifetimes' worth of accumulated experience in studying mortals. "Under most circumstances, killers don't have the opportunity to 'fix the problem'."

"I know," Q said in a suddenly bleak voice. "Oh, I know." He turned to her. "Well. My turn now, I suppose? Quid pro quo?"

"If you wish to tell me. I did not actually tell you this so that you'd be obligated to share your secrets; I told you my secret so you would trust me." She looked at her hands. "An odd way of doing so, I must admit. I half expected you to call me a barbaric primitive and throw me out."

"You _are_ a barbaric primitive. I'd hardly blame you for that." Q grinned. His expression then darkened. "T'Laren, I've seen the worst the universe has to offer. I've seen horrors that would curdle your soul, depths of evil beyond your imagining. One woman murdering a husband who's leaving her is fairly tame, by my standards." He gazed off into space. "And it _is_ important that you've fixed the problem. You see, it's idiotic to blame yourself for causing a problem when you've also solved the problem. For millennia, I believed that actions had no consequences, and I was blameless, because anything I did that I decided was a problem, I could solve with the flick of a wrist. Snap! Problem solved."

"But this-- becoming human-- you could not solve that way."

"True. I can't. But it... isn't my first experience, with a problem I couldn't solve." He took a deep breath. " We _did_ have a deal, regardless of whether you were planning on following through on it or not. You want to know about Azi? I'll tell you."

Q leaned back against the couch. "See, we Q have a-- a problem, of sorts. Most of us don't think of it as a problem, I myself usually thought of it as a plus, but there you go. I may have mentioned this before, that we have a problem with... close emotional intimacy, between two Q."

"You did," T'Laren said. "You said that if two Q are emotionally too intimate they can become entangled in one another, and merge into one being."

"Yes. And the two Q who did that are gone. Dead, if you will." He played with a button on his elaborate topcoat. "Something else you have to know about me-- well, you probably figured this out already. The Continuum tend to have distinct generations. We don't need to create many new Q, since almost none of us ever die, but we do it to prevent the Continuum from becoming completely stagnant. And one could argue that perhaps it hasn't worked, but that's beside the point. Anyway, we do this in cohorts, of a sort; agemates, ranging within a few million years of one another, form one cohort, and then the next set comes along, and so on. And among my agemates, my generation if you wish, I'm one of the youngest Q. But Azi was younger."

He sighed. "She should have died in infancy. Any Q with a strong need for intimacy usually does. Another child will consume them. For an immortal, omnipotent species we have fairly high child mortality; we have to. We have to let patterns that cannot exist as adult Q weed themselves out. No adult Q would ever interfere in a small child's self-destruction. But I was a small child myself, and... I _liked_ Azi. I didn't want to subsume her into myself; from the beginning I never wanted anyone else to influence me, even by becoming a new part of me, under my control. She was a lot more interesting if she stayed outside me. So... I protected her. And I... you know, I was one of the babies, older children taking care of me or making fun of me or both at the same time... there weren't a lot of beings I could play the role of protector to. I liked it.

"We were friends for... longer than you can possibly imagine. And for a long time, I thought Azi had adjusted. Maybe she'd picked up just enough of my pattern when we were still young and malleable that she could defend herself, keep herself separate from other Q. But as we got older, I realized she still had that need for connection, for... I guess you could call it love. She tried to reach out to me, her oldest friend, for it... and I gave her what I could, but it just isn't safe for a Q to get too close. I had to hold her off, and I had to keep her from reaching out to anyone else, because anyone else would just subsume her. By that point in my life, _I'd_ have subsumed her if she wasn't someone I valued so much as an individual pattern. We Q... don't tolerate weakness within our ranks well. It's sort of our evolutionary duty to the species to subsume other Q if they let us."

"It does not sound like such a pleasant life."

"Oh, it's _wonderful_. Don't get me wrong. Through the Continuum, all of us have a deeper emotional connection to one another than any two humans can ever achieve. It's only on the topmost, superficial layers that we have to push each other away or get more or less eaten. It's a balance, and it works beautifully... except when it doesn't. When someone lets personal sentiment interfere, and protects a fellow Q who's weak... you don't want to know what a weak omnipotent being is capable of doing."

"How can an omnipotent being be weak?"

"Oh, I don't mean weak as in less powerful. I mean weak as in flawed. Azi was not a functional Q, or shouldn't have been. But I protected her, and cared for her, and they let me. And everyone thought she was perfectly functional, well within the range of diversity that we actively seek without falling into the range that can't survive in the Continuum. She had a fierce ego, something most of the children that don't make it to adolescence don't have, something that every Q needs." He shrugged. "We thought she was okay."

"But she wasn't."

"She decided, at some point, to fall madly in love with a mortal. Which is, you have to understand, considered something of a vice. Rather like... hmm, I can't think of a human equivalent. It's not morally wrong, it's not as if we think someone's going to be hurt, except for the poor hapless Q idiotic enough to get involved with one, but it's... beneath us. And stupid. Like... like falling in love with a holoprogram might be for humans."

"I see."

"But Azi was hardly the first. One of my older siblings fell in love with a new mortal on the average of every other hundred years, then moped about with a broken heart for a hundred years until she found a new mortal to fall in love with. And it was safe, in a way. I mean, if Azi tried to share herself totally with her lover she'd fry his puny brain, and if she shared herself to the extent that she could it still would be no danger to her whatsoever, so I felt reasonably secure about it. I mean, we were friends, but I didn't own her. I watched over her interactions with other Q, to be sure she was safe and they weren't going to take advantage of her, but it was never like we spent every minute together."

"What you are trying to say is that you were not jealous?"

"Well, I _wasn't_. All right, maybe a little, but not seriously. He was a mortal from a very long-lived species-- he could last a thousand years or so, which was actually a real amount of time to me. Most mortals I wouldn't have cared at all. I made fun of her, of course, but the Q always do that; she mocked me back, and I didn't see any real problem.

"Then she said she wanted to make him a Q."

T'Laren nodded. "Yes, I remember from your files you have the ability to do that."

"Well, he _couldn't_ be a Q. The notion was absurd. He was a Sarrin-- one of those tall, bendy people Sovaz mentioned. They're pacifistic, gentle, telepathic, they communicate with one another in harmony-- I don't care how advanced Azi thought he was, he couldn't survive being a Q. She'd subsume him, in seconds, with the force of her need and the fact that he wouldn't have the vaguest idea how to protect himself. Or they'd subsume each other. And if he _did_ survive, it would be at the expense of all the lovely traits she thought he had, and he would be incredibly lonely, doomed to immortality with people he could never share himself fully with. And I thought that the fact that Azi would propose this at all indicated that she was dangerously obsessed, that she couldn't think straight where this mortal was concerned. So I shot down her proposal in front of the Continuum, and proposed myself that she be forbidden to see him. And we agreed.

"She decided to disobey, and I... I knew it. When you know someone for a few million years, you know what they'll do... or you think you do. And if she disobeyed the Continuum would execute her. So I went to talk her out of it."

He stopped for several seconds. "Did you?" T'Laren asked softly.

"She tore me apart, T'Laren." He looked at her. "Literally. Normally one Q can't harm another Q-- we don't have the leverage, we'd hurt ourselves too badly. She couldn't have killed me without killing herself. But she was trying to. I never saw it coming-- I was trying to talk to her, and then she was ripping me to shreds." He shook his head. "Q against Q violence is almost unheard of. It happens at most every million years. I guess I was just amazingly lucky, that this million years it was me."

"That... is horrible. I'm sorry."

"Don't be. I did far, far worse when I retaliated," he said darkly.

"What did you do?"

"I'm getting to it... They exiled her. Stripped her of her powers, made her a Sarrin and dumped her with her boyfriend. Me, they threw into a little pocket universe to get better. I was barely _sentient_ at first, T'Laren. It's... as if I'd suffered a stroke, or something. I couldn't get my powers to work right, I couldn't think straight, all I knew was that I used to be powerful and with lots of other Qs, and then someone had betrayed me, and now I was weak and alone. It was dark to all my senses, and I could hear the Continuum but I couldn't participate or understand, and I couldn't leave."

"Why did they do that? That seems very cruel."

"No... actually it was the best thing they could have done. They were removing me from the influence of other Q while I was in a weakened and malleable state, so others couldn't change me in ways I wouldn't want to be changed. I had to heal on my own-- they couldn't fix it, or risk changing me, and they knew I wouldn't want that. So they locked me away. I could leave the moment I relearned how to teleport, of course, but until then I was trapped there.

"I learned again how to view the outside world... and I found Azi. And she was _happy_. Or it looked that way, anyway. I'd been trapped in there for ten years already, and it looked to me like Azi was thriving. She'd found her soulmate... and it wasn't me."

"I... understand."

"See, she'd tried to kill me. She'd committed the worst crime any Q of our generation had, that any Q could contemplate-- and now she was thriving and happy. And I was alone, powerless, trapped in darkness, with nothing to do but brood about the injustice of it all for the next thirty years. I... I grew to hate Azi, passionately. I couldn't believe she could be getting on with her life, that she could have achieved everything she'd ever wanted, the intimacy of minds she'd sought for millions of years, when I was suffering like this..." He stared at the floor, and his voice dropped. "So I decided to make her pay.

"And when I got my ability to teleport and my other powers back, the first thing I did was to go to her. I told her how I'd suffered in darkness for the past forty years, while she lived happily with her new husband. And I couldn't touch her-- it was forbidden, for the same reason none of the Q who don't like me can just show up now and kill me. But I could touch her husband."

He looked up at T'Laren, his eyes haunted. "I tore him apart, T'Laren. I shredded him, bit by bit, while Azi watched. I remember her screaming, pleading with me to kill her instead. And I laughed. It delighted me how much pain she was in, how much she was suffering watching him die, because of what she'd done to me."

Q leaned back again, no longer facing her. "The Continuum thought I was excessive. They didn't make me undo what I'd done-- none of them resurrected the man, they let it stand that I'd killed him-- but they feared that it wouldn't be enough for me, that I'd torment Azi again and again. So they forbade me to think about her."

"How can they forbid you to think something?"

"Believe me, it works if you're a Q. It was necessary, I suppose... Q thoughts have a nasty way of becoming reality. But it... I didn't think about it, but on some level I knew, and it haunted me... it's why I went to Guinan, and we know how that turned out..." He looked back at her. "And when they wanted to strip me of my powers, and exile me... I defended myself on every count but that one. For what I did to Azi, I deserved to lose my powers." He shook his head. "And now I know far better than I did then what it was that I did."

"What do you mean?"

"She wasn't happy, T'Laren. She couldn't have been. She'd lost immortality, omnipotence and her family. All she had left was her lover... so she clung to him as a reason for being. She made their love into something that could justify what she'd lost... and I took that away from her. I destroyed her reason for existing, T'Laren. I must have put her in the same position that I was in at Starbase 56." He looked at the floor. "I thought she was dead, when I thought about it... the last time I'd peeked, she was headed into Borg space, and I know she wouldn't have forgotten where that was. At some point she met up with Guinan, because when I met Guinan the second time, when the Borg were heading her way, she said she'd met Azi. But... I figured she was dead.

"And now I know she isn't. And I have to live with that. Because I don't have the power to resurrect her lover anymore."

"And this... is the worst thing you've ever done?"

"I deliberately set out to destroy a fellow Q emotionally, in as horrible a fashion as I could." Q looked at her. "Yes. That's the worst thing I have ever done. Oh, I've harmed alien races, I've put people through tests they weren't ready for, I gloated when the Borg destroyed Guinan's homeworld, but all those things were crimes against lesser species. When I was a Q, I truly didn't consider them equivalent to us, any more than you'd really get all broken up about hurting a bunch of dogs. Sure, it's not nice, it probably means you're a mean person... but it's not evil. What I did was evil."

T'Laren shook her head. "What you did was terrible, but... I think I can understand it. You were not truly in your right mind then, either. And while you cannot 'fix' the problem, as you put it... you have paid."

"Have I?" he asked bleakly. "Can anyone pay for something like that?"

"Can anyone pay for murdering their love?" she replied. "We do what we can, as you said. We go on with our lives, with the knowledge of the worst we can do, and that we have done it, and can never fully atone." She took his hand. "I am no better than you in that regard. I can't offer you absolution any more than you can offer it to me. And I can't offer you forgiveness, because it is not my place to forgive. But I can offer acceptance, and understanding. Because my crime is very much similar."

He smiled crookedly. "If Lhoviri really _did_ fix the universe for you, maybe that's why he chose you. Because you think you understand."

"Perhaps."

They sat in silence for a few minutes. Q broke it finally. "So what happens next?"

"Am I still fired?"

"You are very definitely fired."

"You still need someone to offer you advice, on how to deal with humans and other mortals."

"I could use a bodyguard too. I don't want to go back to Starbase 56 just yet."

T'Laren nodded. "Where did you want to go?"

"I don't know. Anywhere that isn't Starbase 56." He grinned suddenly. "Perhaps I'll go to one of those vacation planets Medellin was always trying to get me to go to."

"And I?"

"Well, of course you'll come along. It's your ship, after all." Q turned to her. "Besides, like you said, I could use some advice. Just don't go thinking you can threaten to throw me out an airlock if I don't exercise any more."

"Of course not. I'll merely point out how much more attractive you looked when you were exercising regularly, and your own vanity will carry you the rest of the way."

"And then I'll point out how boring you look in whatever boring outfit you're wearing."

"What if I'm not wearing a boring outfit?"

"Unless I picked it out for you, it will be."

T'Laren nodded. "I believe this could be an equitable partnership."

* * *

"You sure you don't want to stick around?" Harry asked. "I mean, even _you_ were impressed with the Mihara's technology. This whole first contact thing could be a lot of fun."

"Fun for you, perhaps," Q said, and ostentatiously yawned. "Once you've seen one highly advanced and spiritual society, you've seen them all. Personally, I always liked the more primitive races better. Little species like humanity have a certain raw energy to them which the older, more jaded species lack."

"Including your own?" Markow asked.

"Oh, I'd be the first to admit the Continuum could get a bit tedious at times. Paradise usually does, you know." Q sighed, and then brightened. "No, no, I'll leave the first contact to you folks. I've done my job; it's time for me to ride off into the sunset. My doctor's prescribed a month of vacation time for me, and who am I to contradict her?" He hadn't actually told any of them he'd fired T'Laren. The whole issue was entirely too personal.

"Off to Risa?" Harry said, grinning. "Don't suppose I could come along?"

"Risa is a sink of base animal lust and debauchery, Harry, of course I'm not going there. What were you thinking?"

"I was thinking you might be a lot happier with some base animal lust and debauchery in your life, myself. Tell you what; ask T'Laren if she thinks it would be good for you. I'd cheerily help a friend with his medicine, you know."

"I know," Q said woefully. "You've told me so, ad nauseam."

"Ah well. Can't blame a fellow for trying."

"I most certainly can. I can place blame whenever and whereever I want."

"Where _are_ you going?" Elejani Baíi asked.

"Kyreer. I've never heard of the place myself, but apparently it's well-traveled by tourists, requires little in the way of paperwork so I should be able to go incognito fairly well, and has some fascinating archaeological sites. Not to mention an absolutely lovely shipyard, according to the brochures I've read. If I'm going to go tooling through the galaxy with my Vulcan sidekick, I'd like to upgrade _Ketaya_'s defenses."

"After all the nasty things you've said about the engineering department, I can't believe you actually _want_ to get your hands dirty with technological upgrades," Harry said.

"That's only because you didn't hear all the nasty things I said about the physics department to the engineers."

"I'm surprised," Markow said. "I didn't know you had enough tact to say things about people behind their back instead of to their faces."

"Amazing the things you can pick up in three years, isn't it?" Q agreed.

"When will you be coming back to Starbase 56?" Harry asked.

_When hell freezes over._ "I haven't thought that far ahead," Q said lightly. The idea of never returning to the starbase scared him-- he had no idea what he wanted to do with his life-- but the idea of going back and living in that hell again scared him far more.

"The Joint Laoni Sciences Council would be delighted to have you," Elejani Baíi said. "If you should wish not to return to the Federation. It could well be said that we all owe you our lives, Scamaran and Laon'l both."

"Yes, well, I'd rather it didn't be said. There are a lot of people who are out there trying to kill me, and given that Emaroth is _still_ considered a demon by most Laon'l and Scamarans... frankly I'd rather the subject never came up, okay?"

Elejani Baíi nodded slowly. "Yes... I suppose I hadn't considered that. I won't tell anyone."

"So when are you leaving?" Harry asked.

"Tomorrow night. And no going-away parties, please. Though tasteful gifts are always appreciated."

"I've seen your quarters," Markow said. "I'm surprised you know what 'tasteful' means."

"What it does _not_ mean is 'spartanly barren', though I realize there's a conspiracy afoot in your culture to make you think so. But then, Federation human culture seems to believe one-piece jumpsuits are actually attractive, so quite honestly I wouldn't put much stock in your cultural definition of taste."

"Are you sure we can't throw you a party?" Harry asked. "You have such a huge fan club."

"No, no. That's quite all right. They'll just have to bear up under the disappointment."

"Well, be sure to say goodbye to us before you leave," Elejani Baíi said.

Q looked at her. "I thought that's what I was doing."

* * *

This had to be done, and done before tomorrow night, or T'Laren might never have another chance.

She pressed the buzzer for Sovaz's quarters. The door slid open.

"T'Laren? Is there something I can do for you?" Sovaz asked politely.

"I have come..." T'Laren took a deep breath. "I have come to say good-bye."

"Saying goodbye is not particularly logical," Sovaz pointed out. "I am not a human, that you would need to do such a thing."

"No. But you are my sister, and I have wronged you."

Sovaz considered this. "You said you were no longer my sister."

"That is part of how I have wronged you."

"It was perfectly logical. You are no longer married to my brother. Therefore you are not my sister. It was not wrong to say that."

"Sovaz, let us stop trying to prove to one another how terribly logical we are, shall we?" T'Laren took a step into the room. "I was there for much of your childhood; I was an influence on your life. I behaved as an older sister to you in the same way the Dorsets behaved as parents to me. Even when I repudiated my Terran citizenship to claim my Vulcan heritage, and gave up my foster parents' name, I still continued to consider them parents. The same applies to you. It was Soram who repudiated me, not you. But I have had great difficulty in dealing with fellow Vulcans since that repudiation, and in particular you reminded me of what I had lost, and what my own actions had brought me to. You reminded me of the worst possibilities that lie within myself, and I turned you away for that reason. It was not logical, but it was what I did."

"Why did Soram divorce you?" Sovaz asked.

"I was insane."

"That doesn't seem a sufficient excuse to me. Surely you could have been healed."

"Perhaps our marriage was never meant to be. I have heard that he remarried..."

"He did. A year after we believed you had died... Why didn't you tell us you were alive?"

A year. The minimum decorous period after a mate's death before one could remarry, unless the pressure of one's Time was bearing down on one. And even then, the trauma of a wife's death usually threw a man off his cycle, giving him an additional two or three years before the Time of Mating returned. Soram had wasted no time at all. "I... could not. I owed an obligation to the person who had saved my life, and I could allow nothing to interfere with that." She shook her head. "But that isn't the whole reason. I will be honest-- you deserve that. The truth is I didn't want to. As I said... I couldn't deal with fellow Vulcans right then, or anyone who would remind me of my shame. My control was in total disarray and my emotions were largely ruling me. I didn't wish to be seen by anyone I knew in such a condition."

Sovaz frowned slightly, as if trying to understand. "It seems to me that this was not your fault. You began behaving strangely after you returned from that top-secret mission. I think Soram should have understood that something that happened on that mission clearly caused your difficulties, and he should have stayed with you. The fact that he didn't shames him, not you."

She still wasn't willing to tell Sovaz the whole story... she remembered the shattered look on Sovaz' face when the girl had seen what T'Laren had done, and couldn't bear to let Sovaz realize she was capable of such a thing. "I was the one who faltered. I... believe I am essentially recovered, now, but I am not willing to see Soram yet. There is... in some areas my logic remains impaired, and that is one. However, I don't wish to lose you, and I fear with the way I have treated you I may have done just that."

"_My_ logic remains unimpaired," Sovaz said. "I accept your apology, and I am grateful that you don't wish to lose me, for I've never wished to lose you. I..." She deliberately composed herself. "I will ask you someday why you did it. I have wondered that for two years. But I don't think you can tell me right now."

"I cannot. You're right. Perhaps... someday."

* * *

"I thought you'd already left."

"Growing senile already?" Q mocked. "I don't depart this ship of fools until tomorrow night, remember?"

"Wishful thinking," Markow said.

It felt wrong, somehow, to leave without more acknowledgement to Markow than he could have done in public, at the goodbye lunch the few people he could call close to friends had thrown for him. Perhaps they all deserved more than that, but quite frankly Q didn't want to be alone with Harry, as the man was likely to get maudlin, and might well say or do something that required more tact than Q was willing to muster. And Elejani Baii made him uncomfortable. But Q didn't quite know how to say what he wanted to say, and perhaps it went without saying anyway, but without telepathy who could know for sure?

"I see right through you, Daedalus," Q said. "You want me gone so you can dazzle the conference with your feeble human excuse for a brilliant mind, without being overshadowed by the real thing."

"I want you gone so I can talk to the other one without having to admit I know you," Markow said. "New worlds to explore and all that."

"The other one?"

"The other Q." A silence fell for a moment. "That is why you ran out on the first contact briefing, isn't it? High Magister Martikale's a Q, and you knew her."

Q struggled with a lie, and realized his face had already shown too much to pull it off anyway. "You are entirely too damned perceptive for your own or anyone else's good," he said bitterly. "Tell me, where was that keen grasp on the nature of things when you decided to burn out your nervous system with an alien hat?"

"The same place your brilliance was when you did whatever you did that got you thrown out of the Continuum," Markow said. "Don't do it, Lucy. I can match you blow for blow if I need to."

"Could you really?" Q said in a dangerous tone. "I've got millennia of experience at this, and I've always been willing to call the kettle black. Are you warning me off because you don't want to go head to head with me, Daedalus?"

"I have better things to do then get into pointless mind-shredding competitions with my friends. You're upset over Martikale, aren't you? Did you not want me to talk to her, or did you just not want the subject brought up?"

"Talk to her all you want," Q said bitterly. "All she'll do is present you with meaningless meandering treatises on the nature of mortal emotion, in particular love-- which I'd be willing to bet is not something particularly high on your priority list."

Markow said nothing for several seconds. Finally he said, "It's not impossible, you know."

"What isn't?"

"That someone could love a cripple." His face was unreadable as always, but his eyes burned, and Q was not at all sure he was talking about himself. "Even the galaxy's biggest asshole might be able to find someone. Who knows?"

Now Q was sure Markow was talking about him, or at least both of them. "One would need to be looking, I would think."

"That isn't how it works. Things like that sneak up on you."

"Why are we having this conversation?"

"Because I'm tired of you being an asshole." Markow closed his eyes. "Being a cripple isn't an excuse, Lucy. Much as we might like it to be. You should talk to her. You're in the same boat, it looks like to me."

"You misunderstand the situation so badly, if I weren't used to wrapping my mind around truly cosmic concepts I might not be able to grasp the magnitude of your misunderstanding." Q looked away. "You've heard... I got thrown out for crimes I committed?"

"I figured something like that."

"Azi is one of those crimes," he said softly, then looked at Markow again. "And I'm not going to say anything else about it, so you can stop trying to pump me."

"You can't run away forever."

"Fortunately, humans don't live forever. I can certainly run away for the length of a human lifespan."

"Seems like cowardice to me."

"Fortunately, everyone in the universe knows I'm a terrible coward, so I needn't fear for my reputation."

Markow sighed. "You'll do what you want," he said. "What did you come here for?"

Q took a deep breath. "I'll... miss you, Daedalus."

"You're not coming back?"

"I... don't know. I can't stand the thought of going back to Starbase 56..."

"So go someplace else. Plenty of fish in the sea."

"I don't know," Q repeated. "And... since it's become even more obvious to me how fragile mere mortals are now that I am one... I don't know if I'll see you again."

"The really damnable thing about this condition of mine," Markow said, "is that you can't imply anything. You have to come out and say anything you want to imply. I hate having to say certain things, when I should be able to make them understood some other way."

"But you can't. You're limited by the medium, too."

"Right." Markow considered silently. "Don't get your fool self killed, Lucy."

The idea that he himself could find it more possible to baldly admit to emotion than Markow could struck Q as suddenly, absurdly funny. He laughed. "Daedalus, you're even worse than I am."

* * *

"You're not going to fall off the face of the universe again?" Tris asked.

"I'll try to avoid it."

"Not good enough. I want letters. Lots of letters."

"Did you ever send me a letter?"

"I sent one or two. And they were very long ones. With lots of detail."

"And you pacing around the room instead of looking at the camera. I remember your voice fading out on occasion, and many instructive views of your back."

"So I don't like to sit still. Maybe I'll actually send a written one. In writing. With those squiggly lines on it that most sentient races used for several thousand years before cameras."

"In handwriting?" T'Laren was skeptical. "Is your handwriting legible?"

"It's very legible. Standard's my second language, remember; I learned how to write out of a textbook. Now my _Bajoran_ handwriting is miserable, but you can't read Bajoran, so I won't send you letters in it."

"I will send decorously recorded letters in which I sit still, speak clearly and actually look at the camera."

"Good. And I want updates on this situation with Q."

She felt a little guilty about that. She hadn't told him how the situation with Q had changed. It didn't seem quite fair not to tell Tris, but she was sure she was going to hear it about what a terrible idea this was, and she really didn't need to. "I don't know of anyone else I'd be willing to talk to about it," she said.

He gave her a look. "Very nice answer," he said. "It manages to sound flattering and avoid promising anything all at the same time."

"I'm glad you approve."

"Oh, well. You'll tell me what you want to tell me, I'm sure." He stepped forward. "Barbaric non-Vulcan leavetaking custom?"

"What?"

"Hugs," he said, and hugged her. "Be careful."

"I will try."

* * *

"Will you be coming back?" Sovaz asked earnestly. "I still have a great number of questions to ask you."

"Funny, that's what Daedalus said. I'm beginning to think you people only love me for my mind."

Sovaz blinked. "I don't love you. Love is an extreme example of an emotion, and quite anathema to Vulcans."

Q laughed. "_Do_ take a course in Terran idioms, dear girl. As for coming back, who knows? Perhaps someday you and I will open up a detective agency-- Mysteries of the Cosmos, Solved! If you wondered what happened to your missing mass, if you think your stellar bodies are fooling around on the side, or if you just want to know who changed the gravitational constant of the universe, call on Q and Sovaz. We could even hire T'Laren as our receptionist."

Sovaz simply stared at him. "Oh! Was all of that a joke?"

Ostentatiously Q pressed a hand to his forehead. "Why, oh why do I even try?" he asked melodramatically.

"Does your humorous statement mean that you _are_ coming back, or that you are not? Or does it make a statement of probabilities at all? I confess I really didn't understand it."

"That much is obvious." Q looked down at her fondly. She really did remind him of Data. "I don't know where I'm going," he said, with uncharacteristic seriousness. "Not in the long run. But I will try to come back."

"That is all I can ask," Sovaz said.

* * *

By the next evening, goodbyes had all been said, and the entire ship knew Q was leaving, though he had been careful to avoid actually telling anyone why. People seemed to think it was a mere whim of his, which suited him-- he liked to be thought of as capricious, and this way, no one would suspect his fear of becoming known to the Mihara and their spiritual leader. Except for Markow, of course, but then Markow had always seen through him.

Since _Ketaya_ was extremely small in comparison to _Yamato_\-- about twice the size of a runabout, which itself wasn't much bigger than a shuttle-- it was docked inside _Yamato_'s shuttle bays. Q and T'Laren said their final farewells and walked up into their ship, taking their places at the controls.

"Computer," Q said cheerily. "Set a course for somewhere else."

The computer didn't respond at all, not even to tell him the question didn't make sense. Q frowned. "I think we're having computer troubles."

"I think your troubles are larger than that, human," a voice said behind them.

T'Laren spun around in her seat the moment the voice started speaking-- to face five Ferengi with phasers trained on them. They were Yalit's brood-- she recognized their DaiMon, Dar, as the one who had spoken.

Q stared at them. "What is the meaning of this?" he blustered.

The DaiMon grinned broadly. "You told my mother, the Lady Yalit, that you were worth a great deal of money to the Federation. We're going to find out if it's true or not. Bej! Take the controls from the Vulcan female and pilot us out of here on the routing they submitted to _Yamato_'s computers."

No. She couldn't let this happen. While they were talking, T'Laren was surreptitiously reaching behind herself for the toggle to turn on exterior speakers. She had almost reached it when Bej shot her.

"_T'Laren!_" she heard Q scream, as if from a great distance away. The floor moved up toward her in slow motion, and she was helpless to stop it, helpless to stop any of this.

"We've only stunned her, human. If you don't wish to see anything worse happen to her, you had better cooperate. You are valuable; she is not."

She felt Q kneeling by her side, taking her hand. "All right. As long as you don't hurt her, I'll cooperate." He was doing an admirable job of hiding how frightened he must be, she thought. A flicker of rage at them and pride in him surged through her, that they had stunned her so she could not be there for him, that he had to be strong all alone in the face of these pathetic monsters, and that he was doing so well at it, far better than she'd have expected. "But if you hurt her, you'd best pray to whatever gods you believe in for mercy."

"Why?" giggled one of the Ferengi. "Are _you_ going to strike us down?"

"Shut up, Antek. Let him make all the threats he wants, as long as he cooperates."

T'Laren felt the thrum of the engines coming to life, felt the ship glide out of its berth in _Yamato_'s belly and move out. She wanted to tell Q to dive for the controls, send a message to _Yamato_ that they were being kidnapped, not to worry about her-- since he was valuable, they wouldn't dare hurt him, might not even risk stunning him, and that would give him precious seconds to act. But he wasn't trained for this, and apparently was thinking only about her safety, remaining quiet and unmoving at her side as the Ferengi hijacked their ship.

She was going to have to teach him how to handle a situation like this.

If they both got out of here alive.


	5. 4a: Ketaya

Q sat quietly, fuming with impotent rage and fear, kneeling by T’Laren’s fallen body. She was breathing, at least; the Ferengi had said they’d only stunned her, but the sight of her chest rising and falling slightly, the terribly quiet sound of her breath, reassured him more than words from people who might have motive to lie.

From the computer readouts, he could tell that they were moving away from _Yamato_ at high warp. Without being able to address the computer, he couldn’t get any more detail than that. It infuriated him that the Ferengi had locked him out of the computer—he hadn’t bothered shoring up the security of the system, because it had just been himself and T’Laren. Stupid, stupid. And not nearly paranoid enough. What made him think he and T’Laren had the resources and experience to protect him? He should have stayed on Starbase 56. What were the fools on _Yamato_ thinking of, to let the Ferengi invade _Ketaya_ while it was still docked with _Yamato?_

The ironic thing was that if he could only get access to the keyboard, he could get everything back. He was fairly sure they couldn’t have rooted out his back door—but if his voiceprint had been disabled to the computer, the only way to get in to his back door would be through the keyboard. And there was a computer-linked padd right in front of him, attached to the captain’s chair, which currently was occupied by DaiMon Dar, and if the damnable Ferengi weren’t pointing their phasers at him, he could reach it, log in and lock them out. That, however, wasn’t going to happen.

T'Laren stirred slightly, her head lifting the smallest amount. Q let out a deep breath he hadn't been aware of holding. She was coming around, which meant she hadn't been badly hurt in the first place. He lifted his head to address the DaiMon. "I do hope you realize you've sealed your fate by doing this," he said. "The Federation won't take kindly to you kidnapping one of their most valuable resources. I hope you like the cuisine they serve at penal colonies, because that's most likely where you'll end your days."

DaiMon Dar laughed. "You're very naive, human," he said, mispronouncing "human" as "hyuu-mon" the way most Ferengi did. "Your precious Federation will do nothing. If they're willing to be the highest bidder, we'll demand from them a pardon signed into the contract before we hand you over. And if the Romulans or Cardassians or some other party are the highest bidders, we'll have _them_ contract to offer us sanctuary from the Federation."

"You know I don't know why someone hasn't annihilated your pathetic species. You run around kidnapping innocent people, exploiting lower-tech civilizations and stealing things from your more intelligent betters. You're laughable as fighters and even more so as scientists, and there's no question but that if any of the great powers _wanted_ to destroy you, it could be done easily. You're not going to be able to blackmail the leaders of the real powers in this quadrant with sordid sexual secrets forever, you know. Sooner or later, there'll be a leader who either isn't corrupt or gets his vice quotient satisfied without any need to turn to you for aid, and then you'll be crushed like the small annoying insects you are."

"How dare you!" one of the Ferengi-- Q recognized him as the one who'd been ludicrously overprotective of Yalit when she came aboard, though he couldn't remember the man's name-- snarled, and jumped to his feet.

"Ril, he's just trying to upset us. Stand down," Dar said. "You've got a big mouth on you, human. You might want to watch it. Don't forget you're our prisoner."

T'Laren sat up. "Don't... antagon... ize them, Q," she said slowly, her speech slow and slightly slurred as she came up from stun.

He was desperately relieved to see her recovering, but didn't dare show it in front of the Ferengi. Q contented himself by quickly squeezing her hand. "What can they do to me, T'Laren?" he asked. "They can't very well sell me into slavery if they've beaten my head in, now can they?"

"There's a _lot_ of things we could do to you that wouldn't damage your value," Dar said. "Though I figure a soft, pampered human wouldn't know much about that."

"Get it through your bony skull, _Ferengi._ My humanity is a biological accident-- by name and by species, I am Q." The truth was that he _wasn't_ Q any more, and probably should have changed his name, but it was too huge, too painful a step. He'd had a million names in a million languages, but the vast majority of them had been translations of the untranslatable name of his species. The idea of breaking that tie, of being anything else, bothered him deeply. He stood up. "And I'm hardly soft and pampered. Even if we ignore for the moment the fact that I've been watching you mortals torture each other since before your solar system formed, I've survived no less than twenty-one assassination attempts. I realize you think that the mere fact that you've taken me captive is supposed to have me on the floor groveling in terror, but frankly I've seen any number of terrifying things in my tenure as a mortal, and you don't even make the top fifty."

"I'm sure we could find _something_ that would frighten you," the DaiMon said.

Q was sure of it too, which was why he was working so hard to convince them that they couldn't. Having been terrorized numerous times by experts at it turned out to have some advantages after all; he was well aware that he was alone but for a half-stunned Vulcan, surrounded by captors with phasers, and probably a lot more than these five somewhere else in the ship or in the Ferengi vessel. He would be a fool not to be afraid. But he wasn't going to let them see that, and his extensive experience with being in frightening situations was making it much easier for him to pretend to be in control. "Oh, please. I pick fights with Klingons for fun. Do you seriously believe you could do anything, short of causing me the sort of severe and permanent harm that would drastically lower my price, that I'd even _notice?_" For the first time in his life he wished he knew Ferengi better. The kind of bravado he was displaying would impress Klingons and Romulans into leaving him alone, he knew, and would probably inspire the Cardassians to go out of their way to disprove his statement. He didn't know how the Ferengi thought in matters of war, though, whether it was more important to them to coerce obedience or to respect bravery.

"So you wouldn't mind if we fed you good healthy bugs for your meals."

"Not if you don't mind me going on a hunger strike."

"I would advise that you do not attempt to make life unpleasant for Q, DaiMon, at least not moreso than the circumstances require," T'Laren said, getting to her feet. "He is much better than anyone else at making life unpleasant for others, and he is also perfectly capable of harming himself to spite you."

"Female, if I'd wanted your advice I would have beaten it out of you already," the DaiMon said, with such casual vitriol that it shocked Q. He'd known intellectually that the Ferengi didn't consider women to be people, but the thought of anyone casually dismissing T'Laren's intelligence and personhood with such an unwarrantedly vicious remark, just because she happened to be female, enraged him on a visceral level.

"Your ability to judge fellow sapients as unworthy to talk to solely on the basis of their possession of uteri is nothing short of staggering in the stupidity it displays. Sooner or later you're going to torque off some Romulan Commander and she'll blow up your planet, you know."

"I'm not interested in speaking to your female," Dar said.

"And I'm not interested in speaking to you, but we all have to make our little sacrifices." Q considered. "I know what you could do to me to make me quake in my boots. You could threaten to breathe on me. I think the stench of your unhygienic teeth would paralyze a Breen, and they have excellent air filtration systems in their environmental suits."

"What about a neurowhip?" the pilot said to the DaiMon.

"That's an excellent idea, Bej."

He had to chase them off _that_ one fast. "That's an incredibly stupid idea. Direct neural stimulation? Hello? Has it occurred to you that my only value is my brain? Damage _that_, and you'd be lucky to get a carton of cigarettes in trade for me."

"This is a pointless exercise," T'Laren said in her coldest voice. "Your objective is not to torment Q, but to make money from him. Lock us away where Q can no longer insult you and your crew, and the problem is solved."

"Didn't I tell you to keep your mouth shut, female?" DaiMon Dar said. "Women are only good for one thing." And then he smiled, a horrible crooked smile full of bad teeth. "There we go," he said. "I know what will make you think twice about insulting us, _Q._" He stood up and walked over to T'Laren. "We don't need to touch you. We have _her._"

"I am a Vulcan. It is ludicrous to think you can influence me, or Q, by threatening to torture me."

"Oh, I'm not thinking about _torturing_ you, female. I had a much more pleasant use for you in mind." He grasped one of her breasts, squeezing it. T'Laren stepped back against the wall, her arm raising, and then the pilot, who had also been the one to stun her in the first place, pointed a phaser at her.

"Don't move, female," he said. "Unless you'd rather I stunned you first." He was openly leering at her, but his hold on the phaser looked steady. At least, steady enough that Q saw no way to get it away from him, or that T'Laren could without getting stunned, even with the fighting skills he'd seen from her. He felt close to overwhelmed with helpless rage, that they could _do_ this, that they would treat her this way. His only friend in the universe, and he couldn't protect her. He'd been gambling that he could intimidate them out of harming _him_, and he'd won, and lost.

"This is ridiculous," T'Laren said, looking down at the Ferengi manhandling her as if he were an annoying small child tugging at her shirt. "You might as well copulate with a rubber doll for all the stimulus I will give you. Do you truly think you can harm either myself or Q by such a foolish thing?"

"She's got a point," Q drawled, grateful to T'Laren for giving him the opening. If they didn't think he cared, and they didn't think it'd be fun to assault her, they wouldn't do it. "I hadn't heard the Ferengi were so desperate they'd sleep with _Vulcans_. Can't you afford a good whore? I'm sure your mother must have the names of some good ones from her professional association. T'Laren hasn't got emotions to care what you do to her, and if she doesn't care why would you think I would?"

Ril had gone absolutely purple at the remark about Yalit, and even Dar, who seemed to be better at controlling his emotions, had narrowed his eyes menacingly at Q. Then he smiled. "Oh, she'll care," he said, and leered. "We have on board a fine supply of Romulan aphrodisiac. What do they call that stuff? 'Far togan', wasn't it, Gon?"

The fifth Ferengi, the one that hadn't yet spoken at all, nodded. "Far togan, that's the name of it."

"The Roms swear by it. We hear it gets their Vulcan cousins even more riled up." He ran his hands over T'Laren's breasts again. "If she auditions well, we might even be able to sell her to a brothel for a high price. Not as high as we'll get for you, of course, but then she _is_ only a female."

This was very bad. Q wasn't exactly sure what they were talking about-- well, a drug that was supposed to make Vulcans sexually responsive, that was obvious, but not the details. But he could read T'Laren, and she'd gone into that same absolute ice mode he'd seen from her when she'd threatened to throw him out the airlock and they'd had that vicious argument afterward. She was absolutely still, her face an empty mask, nothing alive in her at all but a pair of eyes like black ice, glittering. Q didn't know whether it meant she was terrified, enraged, or both. Either way he wasn't going to let it happen.

But he didn't know what to do. If he made empty threats, declaring that they would suffer if they touched her, they'd know it was getting to him, and they'd go ahead with it to punish him. If he groveled, he'd feed their desire to see him humiliated, and they'd go ahead anyway to humiliate him the worse. If he pretended he didn't care... they were Ferengi. They didn't see T'Laren except as an attractive _thing_, an object to be used for their pleasure, and if they had a way to break her Vulcan control and humiliate her while raping her, they'd do it because they thought it was fun, regardless of whether or not Q seemed to care. He felt lightheaded with fear and rage, and he wanted to grab the DaiMon and rip the man's ears off with his bare hands like the most barbaric sort of primitive.

And doing that would get him stunned immediately and wouldn't save T'Laren. He needed something else, he needed something else...

"Let her go," he said, a plan forming in his mind. "She is _my_ employee. I won't tolerate you manhandling her like this."

"What do you know! Something that actually bothers the great Q!" the DaiMon said. "Tell me, human, what bothers you worse: the thought of us having her, or the thought of us having her _first?_"

"The gross disrespect to my person in abusing my possessions without my permission, actually," Q said. "I mean it, Ferengi. Let her go, or I'll destroy your pretty visions of vast sums of latinum with a thought."

"Oh, and how exactly are you going to do that?"

"Simple." Q smiled coldly. "I'll kill myself."

"With what? Your bare hands?"

"My bare thoughts, actually, but close enough." He sat down on the floor again, taking a meditative position. "You may know that Vulcans know how to stop their own hearts through meditative discipline. It's not generally known as a skill of humans, but as I pointed out, I am not truly human. There's no ability petty little mortal minds can encompass that _my_ mind can't manage, once taught to do it. And in order to give me a means of protecting myself from being tortured by all those assassins I mentioned that, unlike you, actually _do_ frighten me, T'Laren here trained me in the ability."

"Q, no!" T'Laren sounded genuinely frightened for him, an especially enormous contrast given the intensity of her previous masking. "Do not do this for me." He hoped she was faking it, that she knew this was complete and utter claptrap. How could she not know? She'd never taught him any such thing. But she _had_ taught him how to slow his heart rate through meditation.

"Sorry, darling, but this isn't about you. I refuse to live as a captive of anyone who shows so little respect for my wishes."

"This is ridiculous!" the DaiMon exploded. "You can't possibly intend to kill yourself because we wanted a little fun with your female!"

"Of course not," Q said. "I intend to kill myself because I despise you, and this is the absolute worst thing I can think of to do to you." He smiled mockingly. "Of course, you could probably persuade me to stop by telling me you'll leave T'Laren alone and accede to my other demands if I generously refrain from doing myself in until you've had a chance to sell me, but I think you're too stupid to do that." Deep cleansing breath. Again. What he was preparing to do would be difficult in the face of all these distractions; he was good at meditation and biofeedback control because it was very similar to Q control over their own minds and physical forms when they had them, but the fact that this body _could_ experience pain and fear was very disruptive to attaining the proper state.

"You're bluffing. You wouldn't kill yourself over something this trivial!"

Q focused on Dar. "Didn't do your research, did you, rodent boy?" The mocking smile, lost as he had prepared for an inward focus, came back full strength. "I drank a bottle of acid less than two months ago because I was angry at being forced to try to teach Klingons. I have very, very little interest in maintaining this pathetic sham of an existence, and most especially I dislike being a prisoner with no control over my own fate. I've been a god, Ferengi; the joys of mortal survival, such as they are, pale in comparison. So yes, I am perfectly willing to kill myself to spite you. You should have listened to T'Laren." He closed his eyes.

"You can't do this!"

"Watch me."

He shut out anything further the Ferengi might have to say. For this bluff to work he had to focus entirely on his objective. He leaned his head back against the bulkhead. As he breathed deeply, he focused on the sound of his own heartbeat, transmitted from his back to his ear through the bulkhead. It was the sound of mortality, the sound of time passing and his own dependence on that time, every throb binding him to a life that was barely living and counting down the time until even that was gone.

Slow. He was Q, even if he was human; he should be able to control this shell, bend it to _his_ will. Slow. Imagine the net of neurons firing through this body, imagine the electrochemical impulses, the sodium channels opening and closing and the muscles responding, contract, expand, contract. Slow. The universe reduced down to the pulsing sound, slowing, slowing. No fear, no pain, no adrenal shock here in the depths of the mind. He was bodiless again, he was everywhere in this small universe, expanding like a gas to fill the space around him and there was nothing here but himself and the sound, slowing.

And then pain completely broke his concentration. He blinked, dizzy. Light flooded in, and for moments he wasn't sure of where he was or what surrounded him.

"Q. Come back. They've agreed to your demands. You must come back."

Q blinked again. T'Laren was in front of him. "My... demands?"

"Yes. You don't need to kill yourself. They'll agree to leave us unmolested."

Now he was remembering. "But it was so nice," he said deliberately, sounding wistful. It was true, but he was only admitting it to give himself better negotiating advantage. "So peaceful... no rodents with bad teeth. Maybe I'll go back there anyway."

"Q, you cannot. Please." She raised her hand, and he realized she was the one who'd hit him to bring him out of it.

"No hitting. I'm awake." He looked up at several rather shaken-looking Ferengi. "So you've decided to be rational. How delightful for you. Though I'm still not sure I'm not getting the raw end of the deal."

"If you live, we will not touch your female," Dar said. "If you kill yourself, you leave her free for us. Is that what you want, human?"

Q considered. "While under most circumstances I expect T'Laren to take care of herself, I'm really entirely too nauseated by the thought that you people actually mate with _anyone_, let alone an employee of mine, to tolerate the thought. So I suppose I'll live." He got to his feet. "I don't trust you people, so I am going to insist that you allow T'Laren to room in my suite, where I can keep an eye on her and make sure you're keeping your deformed paws off her. And I want keyboard access to the computers, so I don't expire of boredom."

"You can have your female in your rooms; where else would she go?" Dar said, sneering. "But you can't have computer access. Mother was very explicit about that."

"And you still take orders from your mommy?"

Surprisingly, Dar didn't appear angry over that. "The Lady Yalit is the greatest Ferengi woman ever to live, with a mind for business the full equal of any man's, including the Grand Nagus. I follow my mother's instructions because she's brought wealth and power to our family, and I'd be a fool to think I could do as well. She says you're too dangerous to be given any computer access." He smiled toothily. "You should be flattered, human. The Lady Yalit doesn't consider many people bright enough to be a danger to her."

"I am thrilled at the honor of being seen as intelligent by a decrepit old prostitute, believe you me."

"You should be." Dar motioned at two of his men. "Antek, Bej, escort our guests to their room and lock them in."

* * *

_Control_. She wanted to rip their ears off for daring to threaten her with _farr t'gahn_, for manhandling her as they had, for looking through her and treating her like she was nothing. She wanted to hug Q for saving her from what would have been a fairly horrible death, had the Ferengi gone through with it. But she had to maintain her facade of control-- she couldn't give them the ammunition to know how badly they'd frightened and enraged her.

Once they were in the cell, however, she did hug Q. They might well be being monitored by now, but that was all the more reason to come close enough to him to speak without being overheard. She had to tell him what the stakes were, since it seemed only his ability to bluff was saving her.

"What was that for?" Q asked, a bit bewildered-sounding.

"You saved my life," she said, almost whispering in his ear. "The drug they spoke of would have killed me."

"Killed you?" Q's eyes hardened. "I think that when they sell me off to whoever, I'm going to make it a term of whatever agreement they make me sign that these Ferengi get their ears sawed off with a dull knife. I thought they were talking about _raping_ you. Which is bad enough, don't mistake me, but not even I thought they were so psychotically misogynist as to _kill_ you."

"They wouldn't know. Vulcans do not speak of such things, and the effect on Romulans is different." She breathed deeply, performing a mental exercise to try to calm herself. It wasn't working very well.

"A drug that makes Romulans drop drawers for anything in sight kills Vulcans?"

She opened her mouth, intending to explain how even though women didn't generally undergo _pon farr_ without being bonded, they did have the triggers in their brain, and the Romulan aphrodisiac _farr t'gahn_ worked by triggering the cycle. And that it would require sex with a mindmelded partner, and Ferengi were immune to telepathy, so she couldn't meld with them. They would rape her, and she would need it, long for it, beg for it, but without the mindmeld the cycle would never end, and she would die, mad with need.

But she couldn't say any of that. She'd internalized too much of the Vulcan shame of the _pon farr_. She might have been able to tell Q-- she'd told him something of Vulcan cycles already-- but not when the Ferengi might be listening. Vulcans didn't speak of the cycle to outsiders. She'd told Q when she was telling him about murdering Soram-- she'd already made the decision, then, to lay herself completely bare to him, to tell him the most shameful thing she could think of about herself. Speaking of Vulcan biology was little, next to that. But she would not, could not, so shame herself in front of the Ferengi. Their hearing was excellent, and with computer assistance, even whispering might not keep them from overhearing her.

T'Laren stepped back, releasing him. "I cannot... I can't discuss this any further, Q. But yes. A drug that makes Romulans feel desire, kills Vulcans. I cannot explain."

"Oh, come now. You've told me all sorts of outrageous things about your past, and your species, before. I hardly think--"

She interrupted before he could say anything too revealing. "Q, I must warn you. There is a good chance we are being monitored. I can speak of such things to _you_, but not when they might hear."

"Monitored?" He frowned. "Why do you think we're being monitored?"

"Because I had Lhoviri place monitors in this room, and the Ferengi may have found them by now."

"_What?_" He was on his feet, striding over to invade her personal space, in moments. "You _know_ how I feel about monitors! How dare you invade my privacy like that?"

T'Laren put up a hand. "Calm yourself. I wanted the monitors in place because you were suicidal, but I didn't use them to invade your privacy. There was a life sign monitor which would register if you seemed to be in distress-- cries for help, weakened life signs, that sort of thing-- and I would only activate the room monitors to see and hear you if the life sign monitor indicated that you were in trouble. In fact the one time it did indicate you were having a problem, I found it faster to go to your room than to activate the monitors."

"That's not the point. You knew I would find such an invasion of my privacy unbearable, but you didn't _care._"

"No, not particularly. You'd just drunk a bottle of acid. If you remember correctly, Q, I was willing to do almost anything to ensure that you didn't try to kill yourself again. I was also concerned for invading assassins; though I can't imagine how anything could invade a ship traveling at warp without tripping all sorts of sensors, that doesn't mean it's not possible for any of your enemies, and I don't have a whole security staff here, only myself. I needed some way to know if you were in danger, from yourself or other threats."

"And now you've handed the Ferengi a marvelous tool to use against us. Good going, T'Laren."

"They might have bugged the room anyway."

He shook his head. "We're going to have a _long_ talk about this when we get out of here. But if the Ferengi are monitoring us I really don't particularly feel like putting on a show for their entertainment. Are there monitors in the bathroom?"

"Only life-sign monitors. No sound or visual."

"Good. I'm going to wash up."

She sat down on the couch, trying to focus her mind, to rein in her emotions and achieve discipline again. This was rudely interrupted by Q stomping out of the bathroom. "The replicators don't work! How am I supposed to get cleansing solvents if the replicators don't work?"

"You can use a sonic shower without cleansing solvents if you have to," T'Laren said.

"Certainly, if I want to stink to high heaven. I imagine Vulcans haven't much sense of smell, but unfortunately, humans aren't so blessed."

"Vulcan women have much better senses of smell than human, actually. It's simply a matter of ignoring unpleasantness."

"Well, whoop-de-doo for Vulcans, then, but _I_ don't have the ability to simply 'ignore unpleasantness'."

"We should check to see if we can get food out of the main replicator."

"Mm, yes. That could be a _big_ problem." He stormed over to the replicator. "Cheese sandwich." Nothing happened. "_Damn_ these Ferengi. What do they expect us to eat?"

"They may bring us food."

"If they feed me bugs, I _will_ go on a hunger strike. I won't have bugs in my room. Dead ones, live ones, I don't care. I won't have them." She remembered him telling her that since being attacked by the Maierlen assassin's swarm, he had a phobia of insects.

"You are letting them have too much control over you," T'Laren said. "By antagonizing them as you have, you've inspired them to find ways to humiliate you. Now there are too many factors they have control over, and you have only one threat to hold against them-- you cannot use it on everything, or it will lose its power."

"You mean that if I kill myself over bad food, there's nothing to stop them from molesting you."

"Actually, if you kill yourself, I will as well. I did train you in the ability, although you _did_ promise me you would not use it... though under the circumstances I can't say I don't understand the motivation. It is unreasonable to assume I would not myself be capable of the same feat." T'Laren really wasn't entirely certain how Q had managed to so thoroughly bluff the Ferengi-- they'd howled in terror when their tricorders indicated that his heart rate was dropping, and had immediately given in. She knew perfectly well that that was the limit of Q's ability, but somehow the utter confidence and arrogance with which Q had proclaimed his ability to kill himself, coupled with his incredible value to their Ferengi captors, must have thoroughly spooked them. If they were listening in, and they very likely were, T'Laren wanted to reinforce Q's bluff and protect herself at the same time. "But it is still ridiculous to kill yourself over bad food."

"Ridiculous to you, maybe. I despise eating at the best of times." Q started banging on the door. "Hey! Hey, I need some service, here!"

"Do you think that will do any good?"

"If no one responds, we'll know there are no guards, which would mean the Ferengi are bigger idiots than even _I_ thought, and we can pick the lock and walk out at our leisure." He banged on the door again. "I demand replicator access!"

The door opened, and a Ferengi with leveled phaser-- not a Ferengi T'Laren recognized-- stepped into the room, just a single step. His eyes were focused on Q, but T'Laren could guess from his alert stance that he was probably just as aware of her location. Ferengi might not attach much value to women as people, but they knew better than to underestimate Vulcans of either sex. "What do you want?" he snapped.

"Replicator access," Q said.

"No," the Ferengi said, and started to step backward out of the room.

"How do you expect me to take a shower without cleaning solvents?" Q demanded.

"You need cleaning solvents?"

"And food. And changes of sheets for the bed. And depilator for my face. And a laundry list of items too long to name, so why don't you just be a good little rodent and give me replicator access?"

"No," the Ferengi said obstinately, and this time left the room despite Q's spluttering.

"Q, I think we'd be better off if you didn't call them rodents when you're asking them for favors," T'Laren said.

"_Favors?_ I demand my basic rights as a sentient being!"

"But they have the power to grant them or not." She shook her head. "If you had not gone out of your way to antagonize and humiliate Yalit, we would not be _in_ this situation. Do you learn nothing?"

"Don't you start with me," Q warned. "I didn't want to have an argument with you with our oh-so-charming hosts listening in. But don't push me."

"Don't push you? Both our lives, and certainly our comfort, is at stake. They won't _listen_ to me, or I could play diplomat and smooth things over. But they don't even see me as a person. You are the only one who can win concessions from them, and if you insult and abuse them, we won't get anything we want or need from them."

"I know what I'm doing, T'Laren."

"Do you? What good has _any_ of what you've done accomplished? You were nearly tortured, I was nearly raped and killed, and both of us were confronted with the possibility of being forced to suicide to avoid such fates. I don't see how any of this has been constructive!"

"Don't shout at me."

"I am not shouting."

"Tsk, tsk. Bad Vulcan. Your temper is showing."

She was possessed of a sudden profound desire to smack Q. Which meant, unfortunately, that he was absolutely right-- her temper was getting control of her. T'Laren took a deep calming breath. She was Vulcan. She would master her feelings. Never mind that she was a prisoner of beings who treated her as a complete non-person, sexually harassed her every chance they got and had shown willingness to rape her, trigger her Time, and thus kill her horribly, and the one person whose value to the Ferengi made them listen to him at all wanted to antagonize them into tormenting him. She would not feel fear. She was Vulcan and fear was illogical. "Very well, then. What possible value could your actions gain? If you have a plan, could you see fit to enlighten me?"

"Delighted to. Ever read O. Henry's 'Ransom of Red Chief?'"

Yes, she had. It was a story about kidnappers who took a little boy captive, only to find that the boy was such a monstrous brat that they ended up paying his parents to take him back. "Q, that will not work. The Ferengi are far too enamored of their profits."

"No, no, no. Of course they'll want to make money off me. But if they want to make it as quickly as possible--" he smirked-- "that's to our advantage. We're deep enough in Federation space that it'll take a week or more to reach the kind of neutral space where they could easily hold an auction inviting representatives of all the great powers. So if they decide to sell me off _before_ that point, it'll most likely be to the Federation. And if I make their lives as unpleasant as possible, then they'll be that much more motivated to sell me quickly." He grinned.

"You are overlooking the fact that they hold power over us. If you make their lives unpleasant, they'll take it out on us."

"If I grovel, they'll also take it out on us. It's too late to play nice, T'Laren. I'll admit that I probably could have been more circumspect about my behavior with Yalit in the first place, but then, who would have foreseen that a supposedly civilized being would do _this?_ But having done that, we're no longer in any kind of position that playing nice with them will get us what we want. They're going to abuse us whether we treat them deferentially or insultingly. So our best strategy, given that they're going to abuse us _anyway_, is to give it back to them as much as we can."

"But we can't do anything. Your usual repertoire of sarcasm isn't exactly the equivalent of refusing to feed us, or assaulting us..."

"T'Laren." His expression grew serious abruptly. "I won't let them touch you. I have a weapon I can invoke if they try, and I don't think they'll risk losing their precious latinum. You don't have to worry, all right? I _will_ get them to feed us something edible, and I _will_ get them to give us replicator access or the toiletries we need, and I _will_ keep them from touching you. I can't promise that my plan is going to work, but I can promise you that I won't let them do what they threatened to. No Ferengi would put the kind of profit I represent at risk for the opportunity to humiliate a woman."

"I'm not worried about that," T'Laren said, lying, because of course that was exactly what she was worried about. Q didn't know what it was like to lose his mind, to be totally at the mercy of his body. He thought he did, since for him any demands of the body were overwhelming, but truly, he knew nothing of it at all. And he had some experience with being a nonperson, but he was always a _valuable_ nonperson. Not like this. Not like... like she had no value except as a walking masturbatory toy. T'Laren was quite experienced with, and capable of handling, broader male attention than where her interests lay, but she'd never been anywhere where anyone with power over her could treat her like a toy to be used. The man who'd raped her had done so as an assault, quick and brutal, physically pinning her where her superior strength was less of a concern than her relatively slight mass, taking great care to make sure she couldn't threaten him. He hadn't been able to walk right up to her and fondle her breasts and brag about what he was going to do to her with her helpless to stop him. He hadn't talked through her. He hadn't ignored her and treated her like she wasn't there. It had been bad, but it hadn't been like what the Ferengi had done, and threatened to do. He hadn't been able to threaten to make her lose control.

"So what are you worried about?"

"That they will think of something to hurt us that won't be worth killing ourselves over, and they'll keep doing it."

"They probably will. Not much we can do about that, except make their lives hell for it."

"But if we negotiated with them-- if we back down, and _stop_ trying to make our lives hell, they'd be far more inclined to do as we ask."

He shook his head. "They won't listen to you, T'Laren, so we're doing it my way whether you like it or not." Q turned away. "I'm going to try to take that shower. At least I don't need to be _completely_ filthy."

She sat staring at the wall, trying to meditate and regain control over herself, for several long minutes as he ran the sonic shower.

After a few minutes, she stood up. Meditation wasn't working. She needed it desperately, but couldn't quiet her mind enough to enter a meditative state. Instead, she decided to prepare to take a shower after Q was done. With the controls set properly, so that the high-pitched whine of a badly set sonic shower was absent, she could find them quite relaxing, although nothing was as pleasurable and decadent as a hot water shower. She focused on the thought of a relaxing sonic shower, vibrating her tense muscles, brushing away the dead skin and dirt of the day--

\--she had no clothes.

Her daydream about showers came to an abrupt halt. She couldn't gather up clean clothes to change into after a shower-- she didn't have any. This was _Q's_ room. Unlike the suite they'd shared on _Yamato_, her own quarters didn't adjoin this room in any way. The large walk-in closet was stuffed full of clothes, but they were Q's clothes, and hadn't a prayer of fitting her. And she doubted there was any way to persuade the Ferengi to give her clothes. For one thing, their culture mandated that women go naked, and for another she doubted they'd resist the temptation to inflict such a great humiliation on her. Without access to the clothing cleanser on the lower deck, she couldn't clean these clothes, and without access to the replicator she couldn't make new ones.

T'Laren fought down a rising tide of panic as she inventoried what they did have. She could sleep on the couch in the living room part of Q's suite, but there were no blankets, and the temperature of _Ketaya_ was human-comfortable, not so pleasant for a sleeping or meditating Vulcan. No food. Nothing to clean anything with. There were books aplenty-- Q had stored most of his antiques in the storage rooms on Deck 4 of _Ketaya_, but he had kept his book collection in his bedroom-- but no active padds, not without computer access. It was a two-room suite, luxurious enough for one person to spend time in when he also had the freedom of the ship, but for two to be trapped together...

No. No. She would get control. This was not the most unpleasant captivity she'd endured-- she would not complain that it was too cold and she had no change of clothes. That was absurd and unworthy of a former Starfleet officer, let alone a Vulcan. And it wasn't what was really bothering her, anyway. What was really bothering her was that she had no control over the situation and she was being held prisoner by people who didn't consider her sentient and she had to rely on _Q_ of all people to protect her, when she was fairly certain that his tactics would only make matters worse.

Q stuck his head out the bathroom door. "T'Laren! Get me a bathrobe!"

"Why didn't you bring one in with you?"

"I forgot the replicators don't work. Well, I didn't forget exactly, but I didn't think about the fact that I wouldn't be able to get a bathrobe when I needed it. Come on, T'Laren, be a dear. I have no desire to parade around the room in the altogether while I'm trying to dig up something to wear."

She went through the clothes in his closet, finding a dark purple velour bathrobe, as well as things she didn't really want to dwell on, like spandex pants covered in shiny sequins, a shirt made of black leather strips covered with pointed metal studs, or a leopard-print loincloth. T'Laren carried the robe over to the door of the bathroom and handed it in without going close enough to the bathroom to see inside.

"We may have a problem," T'Laren said as Q sauntered out in his robe. "I have no clothes."

"No clothes?" His voice carried more startlement than she expected. He looked at her. "Oh, you mean no _other_ clothes. For a moment I thought I was going to have to have some words with some Ferengi."

"No other clothes. That's correct."

"Oh, we can fix that. Let me just get dressed."

"Fix it? How do you propose to do that?"

"We have plenty of clothes, they just don't fit you. So we'll have to adjust them." He rummaged through his closet, and started tossing things on the floor. "These shirts should fit you as tunics. We'll have to find you an attractive belt of some kind."

She picked up a shirt and held it to her chest. "I appreciate the gesture, but this would be shorter on me than a 23rd century Starfleet uniform."

"Oh, we'll get you some pants, never fear. The last thing I want you to do is give the Ferengi a thrill. I'd give you an evening gown or two, but I'm afraid there's no way I could adjust that well enough to keep it from falling off your chest."

T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "An evening gown? You own one?"

"_Chère_ T'Laren, I own several."

"May I ask _why?_"

Q started laughing. "Oh dear. Have I landed on another of your illogical cultural taboos again?"

"It's not one of _mine,_" T'Laren said shortly. She wasn't awfully fond of being laughed at during the best of times, and under the current circumstances it seemed like salt in the wound. "It is, however, a very powerful human taboo, and likely to cause you a great deal of trouble for violating it."

His grin got bigger. "I know. That's why I did it." Q stuck his head in the clothes again and started pulling out pants and shirts and tossing them on the ground. "I'll admit that I'm entirely fed up with humanity's stupid taboos, and that, as I am male for good and logical reasons that have nothing to do with feeling 'manly' or whatever humanity's idiotic notion of masculinity is, I find it quite offensive that they would try to prohibit me from doing _anything_ on the basis of my gender. But, you see, there are laws against that. They _don't_ try to prohibit me from doing anything; they attempt to exercise social control, and I think you know how well that works on me. And I have to admit that, if I'd realized when I still had my powers how much it bothers humans when men dress in traditional female costume and how hilariously inept they are at hiding how much it bothers them, despite the fact that by their own cultural ideals it shouldn't make a damn bit of difference, I would have dressed in drag for Picard at _least_ once. I think that could have been very entertaining."

He looked back at T'Laren. "It's the simplest thing. One dresses in an exotic evening gown with high heels and a stuffed bra to make the line fall correctly, and every human one has to deal with either thinks it's hilarious, or is utterly shocked and bothered. And they can't _do_ anything about it because their laws guarantee that men and women have absolute equality." Q returned to his search for clothes. "Poor Eleanor couldn't throw me in the brig for attending conferences in drag with the idiots she inflicted on me... she couldn't even _reprimand_ me, because by law I had every right to wear women's clothing. It was delightfully funny. Of course, the third time I did it everyone had figured out how to hide their reactions, which made it much less entertaining, and when I tried to wear 20th century gigolo pants Anderson found some sort of statute mandating that civilian employees of Starfleet must dress professionally, which meant that clothing designed to be sexually provocative _could_ be forbidden." He pulled out a deep red two-piece suit with black trim. "This'll do for me. As soon as I come back, we'll try to fit some of these pants to you."

"Q, you are significantly taller than me, have wider hips, and your pants are cut for a man. How can we possibly get any of them to fit short of mutilating them and resewing them together?"

"O ye of little faith. Just watch."

He retreated to the bathroom, and returned with a small device, similar to a tricorder. "Hold still. Let me take your measurements." He walked around her with the tricorder extended. "There we go. That'll work."

"What will?"

Q knelt down on the floor. "Watch."

He lifted a pair of pants and began to fold the fabric, making lengthwise folds of two centimeters wide or less, and pressing them down. To T'Laren's surprise, the folds held almost invisibly. "I didn't expect to shrink, so I'm afraid everyone will be able to see where I rolled your hems up," he said.

"What did you just do?"

"Try them on. I want to see if it worked before I set up any others."

Puzzled, she peered inside the pants. It seemed that Q had somehow managed to create small folds in the pants to decrease their width, and made them hold. She carried them into the bathroom and tried them on. They weren't comfortable-- the folds inside pressed against her skin, and the crotch was far lower than her actual groin-- but they stayed on her legs and didn't drag on the floor. She left the bathroom. "How did you do that?"

"Perfect! It looks quite splendid on you."

"I have no interest in looking splendid. How did you do that?"

"Internal polarized magnetic fibers. Most of my clothing is tailored, not replicated, and it was tailored when I first became human. When I started losing weight, I didn't want my clothes to sag, but I didn't want to admit to Anderson that I needed my clothes adjusted, and I knew if I went to a tailor it would get back to Anderson. So I had all my clothes impregnated with polarized magnetic fibers, so I could adjust them myself if need be. Of course I never expected to have to adjust them _this_ much, but I had it done symmetrically so that it wouldn't change the way the clothes hang, so I was able to get them adjusted for you."

"Can the folds be made on the outside rather than the inside? They are getting in my way."

"Well, yes, but you'd look ridiculous."

"I really don't care how I look, Q."

"Fine, fine. I'll fold them on the outside. If you want to look absurd that's your prerogative."

The door slid open then, and a Ferengi-- not one they'd seen before-- entered with a pair of bowls. He sneered. "Here's food for you and your female, human," he said.

From the smell, T'Laren could already tell this was a humiliation ploy. Q walked over, glanced in the bowls, and stepped back. "That's disgusting. I'm not eating that."

The Ferengi grinned broadly. "It's good Ferengi meal grubs! There's nothing wrong with it, human. Have a taste." He set the bowls down and grabbed a handful of the grubs, waving them at Q's face. "Should I give them to your female to chew for you?"

Q was looking decidedly pale. "Get those things away from me!"

She didn't know how severe his phobia of bugs was or what it would lead him to do, but despite the fact that she felt he was practically bringing everything that could happen to them down on himself, she didn't want him to suffer, or to reveal too much of his fear of insect-like things to the Ferengi, who'd use it against him. T'Laren stepped up and retrieved the bowls from the floor. "Put the grubs in here."

"Are you really going to chew them for him, female?" the Ferengi asked mockingly, putting the grubs in the bowl.

"No." T'Laren carried the bowls to the bathroom and dumped the contents down the toilet. As they entered the tiny tube at the bottom, she pressed the fresher button, and the grubs were disintegrated by the waste reclamation system, transformed into raw matter to be reconstituted by the replicator system.

She returned with the bowls. "Q will not eat insects and I will not eat animal matter. If you wish him to survive until you can sell him, you will feed him food appropriate for humans."

"Grubworms are perfectly good food for humans," the Ferengi said snidely. "But... maybe we could work something out. I could bring some food you'd both like... if there was something in it for me."

Q's color was back. "Like what? We don't happen to have a large store of latinum on hand. I'd trade you some antiques, but frankly I can't imagine barbarians like you valuing them properly."

"I don't want anything from _you_, human." The Ferengi licked his lips. "I want your female. How about it? Tasty human food in exchange for a little tasty Vulcan?"

Very deliberately, T'Laren smiled. This was territory she was familiar with. If she could do what she'd done with Melor, she could certainly do what needed to be done here, get a weapon and escape. "We can make such arrangements, yes." She traced her own exposed ear with a fingertip. "I have heard that Ferengi ears are exquisitely... sensitive. Is that the case?"

"I'm going to throw up," Q announced. "T'Laren, food isn't worth this. I couldn't even eat it if you continue this disgusting display."

"I'll do what needs to be done for our survival," T'Laren said to him, then turned her attention back to the Ferengi.

"Oh, yes, very sensitive." The Ferengi licked his lips again. "I think we can come to an arrangement."

"Very well. Bring food, and I'll see what I can do for you."

The Ferengi shook his head. "No, no. Oo-mox first, then food."

"If you insist." She'd known, of course, that the Ferengi would insist on that. It made no difference-- she wasn't after food right now. "Come in."

The Ferengi took two steps, and then another Ferengi appeared at the door. "Brill! Are you insane?"

Brill turned toward the newcomer. "What do you mean? Didn't you hear what she was offering?"

"Of course I heard, you idiot. She's lying! Do you really think a Vulcan's going to give you oo-mox? She's after your _neck_, not your lobes, you fool! She'll knock you unconscious and take your phaser!"

This was, of course, exactly what T'Laren had planned, and she felt a surge of irritation that the newcomer had interfered. "I assure you," she said coldly, "I had no such plans. Vulcans do not lie or practice deceit. I intended only an honest business transaction, acceptable by both our cultures, in order to obtain edible food for myself and my client."

"Then why don't you do it now?" the newcomer asked, brandishing a phaser at her. "Let's see if you'll go through with the transaction when there's a phaser that says you won't break your word."

"No. You have disparaged my honor as a Vulcan. I am no longer willing to do business with you."

"Oh, for the sake of _everything_ that's holy," Q said disgustedly. "Listen up, you two. She's not giving anyone oo-mox because I said no. Instead, you are going to bring me edible food, or as soon as I get tired of being hungry, I'm going to _kill_ myself. Am I making myself clear enough? And you don't touch T'Laren. I don't care what she tells you."

"If you can't control your woman, that's not _our_ problem," Brill sneered.

"It's certainly going to be your problem if you lose your investment, isn't it? Now run off like good little rodents and get my food. And while you're at it, get cleaning solvents too."

"Come on, Brill," the other Ferengi said. "It was very funny, but we need to feed the human something he'll eat."

"I think he should pay us for his upkeep," Brill said. "Why should we feed him and take care of him for nothing?"

"Because he's worth _latinum_, you idiot. Now come on."

The Ferengi left. Q looked at T'Laren. "Did you really think that would work?"

"I thought it might well get us edible food, yes," T'Laren said blandly, willing him to remember that they might very well be monitored.

"Suuure." Q tossed the suit he’d already taken out back into his closet and started rummaging through his clothes again. “I'm going to get dressed. Amusing as that little interlude was, I really don't have any intention of continuing to entertain Ferengi in my bathrobe. And I want something nicer looking than that red thing."

By the time the Ferengi arrived with food, Q was dressed in one of his more imposing outfits, a black suede shirt and pants with a royal purple silk overcloak, and full makeup. T'Laren couldn't quite see the point-- the Ferengi had walked in on him in nothing but a violet velour bathrobe, and probably had monitors in the room anyway, so they had certainly seen him out of his full sartorial armor, and T'Laren herself had seen him in pajamas in a hospital bed-- but it seemed to make Q feel better.

The food proved to be a pitcher of milk and an omelette with bacon and cheese. This almost had to be deliberate. T'Laren took a glass of milk and watched as Q busily tucked into the omelette. At least he wasn't whining about the quality of the food.

He had eaten about a quarter of the available food before he looked up. "Aren't you eating?"

"Eggs and bacon are meat products," T'Laren said. "I can eat animal products that were originally derived with no death-- dairy, primarily-- but eggs and bacon are derived from the death of living things. I cannot eat such things."

Q rolled his eyes. "T'Laren, they're _replicated._ Nothing died to make this omelette, I assure you."

"I am aware of this. It doesn't matter. I cannot eat any of this."

"Look, eggs and bacon are hardly _my_ favorite food, either. But we need to keep our strength up. Where's that relentless Vulcan practicality?"

"Strongly desiring to not become nauseous. I have not eaten meat in many years. Most replicators designed for humanoids produce partially pre-digested milk that humanoids can drink without gastric distress, but they don't do the same with meat products. I no longer have the ability to digest meat without becoming ill." And she had failed, or was barely managing to struggle by, on so many other aspects of being a proper Vulcan, but following the dietary restrictions was something she could do.

"Damn." He put his fork down. "They planned this, didn't they? They knew Vulcans can't eat meat products, and they didn't want to risk _me_, so they deliberately gave us something I can eat and you can't. I'm going to have to have words with them." He started to stand. She caught his arm.

"No. It's all right, I can fast for days without losing my strength. I don't want you pushing another confrontation with the Ferengi."

"T'Laren, this is a deliberate insult. Do you really expect me not to respond? I told you, I'd make sure nothing bad happened to you, and I'd say starving qualifies as 'bad.'"

"No. I would really rather you didn't antagonize them any further than you have. Sooner or later they must feed us vegetable matter, for the sake of _your_ health if nothing else. I can wait a day or so with no ill effect at all. Vulcans are desert dwellers; we evolved to go without food for days if needed."

Q took a deep breath. "I suppose you're right. As long as it's not mushrooms. I _hate_ mushrooms. Nasty little fungal lifeforms. Anything that began its existence in a pile of fecal matter isn't passing my lips, even if it _is_ a replicated copy."

"You do realize that if they're monitoring us, that's the first thing they'll do?"

"Oh, wonderful, T'Laren. Thanks for giving them the great idea, if they haven't thought of it already."

"Perhaps you should have thought of that before mentioning how much you disliked them."

"Well, maybe they're not listening." Q took a mouthful of omelette. "I hope not, because I absolutely despise mushrooms."

Something about the absurd willfulness with which he kept repeating it, even more single-mindedly than Q usually lambasted the things he didn't like, triggered a realization in her. Her eyes widened slightly. Of course. Q was checking to see if they really were listening. If mushrooms turned up in his food, they would know they were definitely being monitored, and if they didn't, then they would know that either they were not being monitored or that the Ferengi had decided to stop playing the humiliation game with them. "You dislike so many things, it's a wonder you find anything to eat," she said. "Who would have thought a human would dislike chocolate?"

"Hey, _you're_ the Vulcan who hates fruit!" His tone was quite put-upon, but there was a sparkle to his eyes, pleasure that she'd caught onto his game. The trickster was in his element, it seemed. _Please don't throw me in the briar patch!_

She got up and busied herself picking up the clothes Q had left casually tossed on the floor-- she didn't want to make a habit of picking up after him, but he was eating, and she didn't want to pay too much attention to what he was eating. Despite the fact that she knew intellectually meat products would make her sick after so long not eating them, and despite the fact that she was wholly committed to maintaining Vulcan discipline about her diet, the truth was that, raised on Earth by humans, she had been trained at an early age to like things like eggs and bacon. The smell would have nauseated a proper Vulcan; it was just making her hungry, and with no prospect for food anytime soon, she had to shut it out and maintain discipline to control the hunger. Something to do was helpful. And it was an outrageous mess. Q would pick it up himself sooner or later, but she'd really prefer sooner.

After he was done, he said, "So."

"So?"

"So. What do we do to keep from staggering boredom?"

"You have books here, don't you?"

"I've read 'em."

"Read them again."

"I can't read books again." Q shook his head. "I remember how it's going to turn out. Completely ruins it for me."

"I haven't another suggestion then. Unless you have some sort of gameset in amidst your things?"

"Hmm." Q considered. "I have cards, but I don't know any games. I do also have a traditional chess set."

"Not three dimensional chess?"

"Chess was a game with hundreds of years of human history. Three dimensional chess has only been around for about 150 years. Hardly an antique."

"Excellent. Let's find it."

"You sound enthusiastic."

"I have lost every game of three dimensional chess I've ever tried to play. But I'm quite good at traditional chess. Prepare to be trounced."

Q grinned ferally at her. "No one trounces me at a game of intellect, my dear. Let's see how good you really are."

* * *

As it happened, she did trounce him, the first three times they played. Although Q would have declared "trounce" to be entirely too strong a term. She _defeated_ him, but he certainly wouldn't have called it a trounce. The fourth time-- he insisted on there being a fourth time-- he beat her, having figured out her trick. She was simply more patient than he was. She sat lingering over her board for far, far longer than he could stand to do, assessing every possible move, before she made it. All that Vulcan discipline had to be good for something, he supposed, and discipline of any sort was hardly what he was best at.

But he could learn to do anything he put his mind to.

There was no fifth game. Q complained of this, loudly proclaiming that T'Laren was a sore loser. T'Laren pointed out that they had been playing chess for close to six hours, and if she was a sore loser, the sore referred to the state of unused muscles and overused eyes, not an emotional state. By this time, it was very, very late-- they'd been taken captive in the early evening, and it was long past either of their bedtimes, but neither of them quite wanted to face sleep. At least, Q didn't. He didn't know what T'Laren's opinion on the matter was, but she'd given in to his demands for more games three times, so he had to assume she really didn't want to sleep either.

"It is late," she said, unnecessarily. "Q, we should retire."

"If you insist," he said grumpily. "I personally am simply jumping with glee at the notion of attempting to sleep under _these_ conditions."

"I do not enjoy our captivity any more than you do. But we have no choice. We need to maintain our alertness and be ready for any change in our situation."

In other words, _be ready in case we have an opportunity to stage a jailbreak._ Q hadn't had any idea what she was doing when she had actually offered one of the disgusting creatures sexual favors, but as soon as the Ferengi had accused her of plotting a jailbreak, he knew. The fact that T'Laren had defended herself against the accusation by claiming that Vulcans didn't lie-- itself an outrageous lie, particularly when applied to T'Laren-- had clinched it. And that had reminded him that she was a Starfleet officer with spy training. A counselor, yes, but probably a hell of a lot more accustomed to jailbreaks and derring-do than Troi or Medellin. Knowing that made him feel a lot better. Though he wouldn't have admitted it to T'Laren, he was worried about his plan-- tormenting the Ferengi _could_ lead them to decide to get rid of him as fast as possible, but it could just as well backfire, and the only weapon he had was the bluff that he could kill himself.

Of course, if he could get his hands on something he could use as a weapon, he didn't have to bluff. And it might come to that. He would _not_ be sold into slavery. As bad as things had been on Starbase 56, he had been a Federation citizen and had nominally had rights. He wouldn't allow himself to end up somewhere where he had fewer protections than that. And then there was T'Laren. He'd gotten her into this... he had an obligation to get her out. An overwhelming responsibility, for a man who'd only begun to grasp the finer points of self-defense, who'd never in his life needed to know how to protect others, except through argument. It was very reassuring that T'Laren actually knew what she was doing, should it come to a jailbreak. It would also be helpful that he'd crawled all over the inner conduits of _Ketaya_, trying to learn everything he could about the ship, since they had no engineer and would have to rely on him if anything broke.

T'Laren laid herself on the couch, straight. No blankets, her head on the headrest with no pillow cushioning it. "Don't you want bedsheets or something?"

"I will be meditating, not sleeping. Vulcans do not require sleep; we require only a peaceful meditation period. And I do not believe there are any bedsheets in any case."

"Sure there are. You think I'd trust my skin to replicated junk? I have several spares."

"No wonder your luggage was so heavy."

"Do you want one?"

"No, that won't be necessary. Go to bed, Q."

He grabbed some pajamas, and headed back toward the inner room. Something about the arrangement was bothering him. Certainly he preferred not having T'Laren in his bedroom, and he had to admit that, although the Ferengi could easily walk through any of the doors, since he couldn't lock them, he liked the idea that if he had to be vulnerable in sleep, it could at least be in the inner room where they'd have to get through two sets of doors if they wanted to harass him. And yet there was something nagging, something unpleasant. A vulnerability, a feeling that there was more exposure than there should be. But how could there be? He was sleeping in pajamas-- nice ones, royal blue silk, with black satin cuffs and high collar and matching black satin slippers-- and the doors would all be shut. What vulnerability could there possibly be, that he could actually overcome?

T'Laren, he realized. In the outer room, drawn into her meditations, lying on the couch right near the door. Only his bluff to kill himself would keep them off of her, and if they could pull her out in the middle of the night without waking him, they could do as they wished with her, and she wouldn't have even the protection of his bluff.

He marched back out to the room. "T'Laren, wake up. You're sleeping in my room."

She opened her eyes. "I am not asleep. And of course I am sleeping in your room. This entire suite is your room."

"That's not what I meant. I mean, I want you sleeping in the inner room."

"There is only one bed in there."

"So you can sleep on the floor. I can put some blankets down and it'll be just as comfortable as that couch you were using."

"Q." She blinked at him. "Exactly why do you think this is necessary? You and I have always slept in separate rooms."

"We haven't been prisoners before," he said tightly. "Just do what I say, okay?"

"I see," she said, and her manner softened. She stood up. "You need not be afraid of an attack in the night, if that's what you fear. I will guard you."

He goggled for a moment at her. She thought he wanted her to protect _him?_ From what? He'd probably have nightmares, but it wasn't as if she could protect him from that. It was on the tip of his tongue to deny it-- he couldn't have the Ferengi thinking him such a complete coward, if they were listening.

And then he realized that if they _were_ listening, and they hadn't yet realized they could separate him from T'Laren while he slept and molest her then, he had better not give them any ideas.

"I'll be perfectly fine," he said acerbically. "I just think it'd be better if... you were close by." He let his body language lie to her, let a faint tremor run through his body while he kept his face a sarcastic mask. She'd jump to the conclusion that she was right, that she was needed to protect _him._ It wasn't the first time in his existence he'd adopted a humiliating pose to get what he wanted, but it bothered him. She thought he was a coward, to jump at shadows. _He_ was in no danger in this place, until they sold him. _She_ was. But she was so used to being the strong one, the protector, it probably hurt her badly to realize that here, she was vulnerable. Just as it had hurt him to become vulnerable, the first time. But she at least had the advantage of being able to lie to herself about it.

He hated being thought a coward when, for once, he was doing something heroic. After all, he didn't _want_ T'Laren in his bedroom. It was his private place, and the thought of being vulnerable there with anyone bothered him. But if he pointed out to her that he was being the hero this time, it would hurt and endanger her, which missed the whole point. So he said nothing else.

They took one of the blankets-- the air was chilly; the Ferengi seemed to have reset it for a lower temperature, with greater humidity-- and folded it on the floor for T'Laren to lie on, and in, like sandwich meat. Q dumped another one of the blankets on his bed and climbed into it, pulling the covers around himself to make a pseudo-cocoon, with only his head sticking out.

"Good night, Q," T'Laren said softly. "Sleep well."

"Good night, T'Laren," he replied, staring at the wall, knowing he would not be able to sleep at all.

* * *

It was a horrible night. He could not lose consciousness of the fact that T'Laren was in his room. Despite the fact that it had been his choice, despite the fact that she was virtually silent, simply the tiny sound of her breathing grated on him, reminding him that he was, for the first time in his human life, sharing his bedroom, and why. He had been held under house arrest before, he'd been thrown in a brig when he'd been human for all of ten minutes, but he'd never actually been held captive by people who'd taken him against his will. At least they didn't want him dead, unlike the rest of the people who'd come after him in his life, but the prospect of being sold to the highest bidder didn't appeal-- despite his knowledge of his own value, there was that terrifying, nagging idea that the Federation might _not_ be the highest bidder, might not be willing to be. He might end up in the hands of the Cardassians or the Romulans or the Zellurians. He might be sold to one of the enemies who wanted to slowly torture him to death. In light of these possibilities, he didn't see how he could possibly be expected to sleep. He couldn't get comfortable, either, but if he tossed and turned, the Ferengi monitoring him-- if they were monitoring, but he had to assume they were-- would know he was suffering. And he couldn't allow that.

When the chronometer displayed 0700 hours and the room's automatic lights started to brighten, Q's mood went from bad to worse. It wasn't the first time he'd "awakened" after a night of not sleeping at all, but it was the first time in his life as a human he'd had to do it without coffee. He stayed in bed, staring at the ceiling, as T'Laren rose and disappeared into the bathroom for her morning ablutions. But there wasn't much point to staying in bed indefinitely-- he wouldn't be able to sleep any better now than he had all night, and if he was active, maybe he'd be fractionally less bored.

While T'Laren was in the bathroom, Q staggered out of bed. He felt much as he had in the days right after the Ceulan assassin had tried to kill him, when he'd become so frightened of sleep that he'd simply stopped doing it to the best of his biological ability. His eyes burned, his body was leaden, his head hurt, and his mood was savage. Taking a shower wouldn't help at all-- he didn't need a shower now when he'd taken his last one so late last night, and would simply be a reminder of everything he didn't have right now. Like cleaning solvents. And caffeine. The lack of caffeine was torture. So he didn't bother waiting for T'Laren, although being able to get into the bathroom to pee would be nice.

Of course, since the replicator didn't work, he couldn't immediately change into clean clothes, either. Muttering curses under his breath, he put his bathrobe on and stomped out into the living room, to rummage through his closet for something to wear.

The door opened before he had found anything acceptable. A smirking Ferengi entered the room with a tray, on which were two covered bowls. "Breakfast!" He set the tray down on the coffee table and stood there, still smirking.

There were two others standing in the hallway, phasers holstered but easily reachable, watching. T'Laren came out of the bathroom, wearing one of his shirts as a tunic-- a green one, despite the fact that people with green skin really shouldn't wear solid green, ever, but then T'Laren's lack of fashion sense was legendary-- and a pair of his black pants. She looked like what she was, a woman wearing a much larger man's clothes-- all the tailoring he'd done had only managed to keep them from falling off her, not to keep them from making her look like she was drowning in them. His shirt didn't look like a tunic on her, it looked like a muumuu.

Warily Q turned back to the waiting Ferengi and took one of the covered dishes off the tray. He lifted the cover. If they had taken the bait from last night, he expected there'd be a mushroom omelette or something.

Instead it was bugs. Not even grubs, this time. Nasty, squirming, swarming, crunchy, carapaced creatures with far too many legs. In sudden overwhelming disgust and fear, Q dropped the bowl. It hit the floor, and the bugs all fell out and started crawling around on his carpet. The three Ferengi-- the one standing by the tray and the two watchers outside the door-- howled with laughter.

Nausea and fear turned to white-hot rage. They wanted to use his biology against him? That was a two-edged sword. Q may have led a very fastidious life as a human, for the most part, due to his sincere desire not to _have_ a physicality and all the gross and disgusting things that came with it-- but he had studied trickster legends. In thousands of cultures, beings with the same archetype he'd modeled for billions of years engaged in all sorts of disgusting activities to make their points. Too overwhelmed with fury to think about anything but humiliating the Ferengi as badly as they'd done him, he let his robe fall open, yanked his pajama pants down, grabbed his penis and began emptying his morning-full bladder directly into the face of the Ferengi in front of him.

The Ferengi screamed in horror, threw his hands up to protect his face and backed away. The two Ferengi in the hallway rushed in, grabbing Q. At one point he would have cowered into a ball rather than resisting, but T'Laren had been training him in self-defense, and he was furious. He fought back, attempting to pull his arms free through sheer physical force, ignoring the pain as they were wrenched in favor of cursing at the two men holding him.

T'Laren joined in, nerve-pinching one of the two Ferengi, which made the man lose his grip on Q. She pulled him off Q and threw him into a wall, as Q managed to pull himself free of the other one now that he had an arm free. The other one stumbled backward, drew his phaser and fired at T'Laren, dropping her. Q had to assume she was only stunned. He shoved the Ferengi with the phaser, hard, knocking the man to the floor. The phaser went flying. Q dove for it, but it was still closer to the Ferengi, who managed to grab it before Q could reach it.

At this point three more Ferengi, responding to the screams of the one Q had urinated on (who was still huddled in a ball on the floor, and still screaming hysterically), ran into the room, phasers drawn. "Freeze!" one of them screamed at Q, who instead backed up, getting to his feet.

"He-- he _pissed_ on me!" the one on the floor wailed. "He pulled out his _oogan_ and he _pissed_ on me!"

The one Q had fought with held his newly retrieved phaser steady on Q as he got to his feet. "Don't move, human, or you'll get what your Vulcan friend got," he warned.

Q smirked. "Then shoot me. I'm sure gunning down unarmed prisoners makes you feel like big manly men."

"Grab him," the Ferengi ordered his three backups. This time Q couldn't fight back. He tried, despite the phasers-- what were they going to do, stun him? He'd have preferred that to the beating he expected was coming-- but Ferengi, though shorter than the average human and a good bit shorter than him, were proportionately stronger than humans. He wouldn't have been able to fight off two without T'Laren's help; he had no chance with three.

They forced him to his knees as he struggled and cursed them inventively, and then shoved his face into the second bowl of bugs, the one he hadn't dropped. Q screamed, visceral disgust combining with flashbacks of being stung nearly to death. And then he shut his mouth and eyes tightly as his face was forced into the bowl. The bugs in there were alive, if sluggish. They crawled on his closed eyes and lips, itchy tiny legs and hard carapaces brushing over his skin. A thin whine escaped from between his closed lips.

"Eat them! Come on, eat!" one of them shouted.

With teeth still closed tightly, Q opened his lips enough to snarl, "In your dreams, rodent boy."

That got his head pushed even harder. The bowl was smaller than his head; the unrelenting pressure of hands was painfully driving his forehead and his chin into the edge of the bowl. "You break it, you buy it!" Q shouted, still with teeth clenched. "Can't sell my head if you break it!"

He screamed-- through clenched teeth-- as one of them pulled his hair, very, very hard, and held it tightly. "Open your mouth and eat, animal. Or we could rip all of this out without damaging your value any."

"Even if I was as bald as you I still wouldn't be as ugly," Q retorted.

"Turn him over and hold him down," the one who seemed to be in charge of this, the one who had shot T'Laren, said.

The three Ferengi holding him flipped him over onto his back. One sat on his legs, the other two knelt on his hands. It hurt. Q tried to kick his legs, tried to dislodge the one sitting there-- his legs were stronger than his arms and they hadn't separated them and he had the leverage of his torso-- but this came to a quick end when the fourth Ferengi came and sat on his chest. The man grabbed his earlobe and twisted it painfully. "Ow! Watch it!"

"Open your mouth or I'll rip this off."

"That's not going to deter my sex life in the slightest, I'll have you kn-- OOOOOOWWW! Let _go_, damn you!"

"I _could_ do this to your balls instead, if you insist, but frankly I don't feel like feeling you up. Humans aren't my type. Not male ones, anyway. Now, are you going to open your mouth or am I going to rip your lobes off with my fingers?"

"How kinky," Q gasped through the pain. "You must be a big hit at your mother's BDSM parties."

The Ferengi pulled harder on Q's ear, hard enough to bring tears to his eyes. "You like those kind of parties?" he asked, as Q howled.

"You're so predictable," Q panted. "Pathetic insults and even more pathetic threats. Didn't I _tell_ you you can't frighten me?"

"Doesn't sound like you're not frightened," the Ferengi said, grabbing the second ear and pulling that, just as hard. Q felt as if his earlobes really were on the verge of being ripped off his head.

"That's... _pain_, you idiot... not fear. Not... the same thing." Although if he hadn't had so much adrenaline racing through his system they probably _would_ have worked out to be about the same. And then there was the fact that technically, he was lying; the truth was that he was terrified. But he wasn't going to beg, and he wasn't going to give in, not for a little pain anyway. He was done with both.

"Why don't you break all his stupid flat teeth?" the one sitting on his left arm said. "Then you can just pour the bugs down his throat."

"Good idea." The Ferengi drew his phaser again and reversed it, butt end hovering over Q's mouth. "You going to open up, human, or do I break all your teeth in?"

"Considering your standards of dental care, I suppose you leave me no choice," Q snapped. He took a deep breath-- this was going to be horrible, but having all his teeth broken in this far from Federation medical care had even less appeal-- and opened his mouth.

His captor proceeded to pour the contents of the bowl of bugs in. Q choked and gagged, head thrashing, his eyes closed so the ones that fell out and crawled on his face couldn't get into his eyes. When they let him up, he spat out as many bugs as he could, and still could feel their bodies crawling around in his throat, still could taste their bitter, nasty shells. His stomach heaved, and he threw up on the nearest Ferengi, who screamed. "Those were my _best shoes!_ They were worth two bars of latinum!"

"Not... any more," Q said hoarsely.

Infuriated, the Ferengi ripped off his vomit-soaked shirt and wrapped Q's head in it. Q attempted to slam his head into the Ferengi, but the others were holding him tightly enough that he couldn't get the leverage. He started ostentatiously hyperventilating, pretending he couldn't breathe-- the truth was he didn't _want_ to; the smell of his own vomit was threatening to make him throw up again. Apparently frightened at their cash cow's seeming fragility, they immediately let him go. He pulled the shirt off and threw it to the floor.

"That's what you get," the one who'd shot T'Laren said. "You act like an animal, we treat you like an animal."

"Other way around," Q said coldly. "You treat me like an animal, and I'll act like one. Give me food I can eat and basic toiletries, or next time I start channeling this body's ape ancestry, and I'll throw feces."

The one he'd peed on-- who was _still_ curled up in a ball-- started whimpering at that. The one who'd shot T'Laren looked at him in absolute disgust. "You make me sick."

Q lifted the soiled, vomited-on shirt and waved it as a banner. "No, you make _me_ sick. See?"

"Let's get out of here," one of the three relative newcomers said.

"Yeah. Get Fril." The leader-type shook the one curled in a ball. "Come on, Tak. Come on and get showered and changed."

"It's _disgusting!_ How will I ever get a female to touch me again?"

"You _wash_, Tak. Then they don't know a human pissed on you. Come _on._" He delivered another glare at Q before leading his younger friend out. Two of the other three carried the stunned one out; the third walked slowly, backing up, holding a phaser trained on Q until they had all left the room and the door shut.

Q looked around himself. He smelled like vomit and bugs, there was still a horrible taste in his mouth, T'Laren was stunned-- he could see her stirring very slightly, now-- there were horrible disgusting bugs all over his bedroom, and a smell of urine from where the Ferengi he'd peed on had dropped to the floor and started wailing rather than trying to clean himself up. By most lights it had been a disaster and he'd gotten much worse than he'd given. But then, he hadn't curled up on the floor and cried for ten minutes like the one he'd peed on had.

Q got up and staggered to the bathroom, where he stripped off his horribly soiled bathrobe and stepped into the shower. He sat on the floor, leaned his head back against the wall, and laughed, and laughed, until his side hurt. He was a helpless prisoner and yet _he_ had managed to get the upper hand and totally upset his captors. Oh, had he ever gotten to them. By his count, he'd won, and won spectacularly. He laughed until tears came out of his eyes, and when he left the shower and walked out naked to get his clothes, he was still laughing.

He waggled his penis at the ceiling. "You know what else?" he yelled at the unseen monitors. "It's still bigger than yours, too!"

Then he practically collapsed in the closet from laughing too hard. It wasn't until one of the freed bugs crawled across his naked thigh that his hilarity stopped, and he realized he had a huge cleaning job ahead of him. He sighed. "Fun is never free," he muttered, got to his feet, and got dressed.

* * *

T'Laren rose up to consciousness slowly. She blinked, looking around her. The last thing she remembered was being hit with stun; it must have been stun on full strength, or she'd taken more of the beam than she had last time, because this time she'd entirely lost consciousness.

She was lying on Q's bed, and aside from some bruises where she'd hit the floor, she felt fine. She got to her feet. There was a thumping noise out in the suite, and then Q's voice, "Gotcha!"

T'Laren raised an eyebrow. What was going on?

As she stepped out of the bedroom, she heard "Puny insect, feel the wrath of the mighty Q!" and saw Q leaping, landing with both feet together on a small area of the floor.

T'Laren's eyebrow went up even further. "Q?"

"Oh, good, you're awake. You can help me."

The room smelled horrible. She remembered what Q had done, and winced inwardly. "Help you do what?"

"There's bugs everywhere. Since our kindly hosts apparently couldn't be bothered giving us the means to get the vermin out of our room, I've been trying to squash them all, but I think a lot of them are hiding under the couch and I am certainly not going to try to lift it by myself."

She walked over to the couch and lifted it, tilting it onto its side. Dozens of insects scurried out. Q began frantically stomping on them.

"Did you have a suggestion for cleaning up the remnants of the insects?" T'Laren asked. "While I sympathize with your desire to remove vermin, having dozens of squashed insect bodies all over our room is hardly cleaner."

"I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. First I have to kill them all."

"And you think you can accomplish this by running around stepping on them?"

"Is there a good reason why not? They squash very nicely."

"They will likely find places to hide. For instance, the blankets I left in the bedroom."

"So don't go back in the bedroom until we're done here. As long as the door stays shut, they can't get in there."

He had a point. On Earth, in Texas, cockroaches were sufficiently ubiquitous that shutting a door to keep them out was a laughable idea. But on Earth, the buildings were old and not designed hermetically, as spaceships of any kind had to be.

"How many do you believe there to be?"

He shuddered. "Far too many. I wasn't in much of a position to count them. But I think I've probably killed a hundred or so."

"I imagine not. What happened after I was stunned?"

"Gotcha!" Q pounced on a scurrying insect, crushing it. He turned to T'Laren and grinned broadly. "I won."

"I can see how your triumph over an insect would impress you under the current circumstances--"

"No, I mean that's what happened. I won."

"And yet there are insects all over our floor."

"Sure, and the place still smells disgusting, and my pajamas are permanently ruined. But you should see the other guy."

"_What_ possessed you to do that? I understand that you strongly dislike insects, but I cannot imagine how you could have helped the situation by _urinating_ on one of our captors."

"If they give me bugs next time, I'll be very surprised."

"Your forehead is bruised."

He reached a hand up to his forehead, touching the circular mark there. "Is it? Ow. Yeah, you're right. I've been too busy killing bugs to notice."

"Q, in what sense is you having your forehead bruised and me being stunned possibly construable as you winning?"

"I told you. They'll give us real food next time. You just watch."

"But you're _hurt._"

"Barely. I've had far worse than this. Besides. I fought _back_, T'Laren. Did you see me?"

"Yes. But then they stunned me."

"Yeah, yeah, and they eventually made me eat some of the bugs, but that's not the _point._ The point is, I fought them, and it took five of them and a phaser to make me do what they wanted. And I didn't beg even once." He was grinning broadly, obviously extremely pleased with himself. "Meanwhile the one I peed on cried and whimpered the whole time the others were fighting me. So, I won."

Well. She _had_ wanted him to learn self defense and gain a measure of confidence in his own ability to stand up for himself. On the other hand, antagonizing people who held their lives in their hands by urinating on them was not what she had been hoping he would learn to do. "I suppose that's one way to look at it. I think it would be preferable to define 'winning' as a situation in which you were _not_ attacked and forced to eat insects, though."

"I'll take the wins I can get."

She put the couch back down on the floor. "I don't see any more of the insects. I think now would be the appropriate time for you to cross that bridge."

"There might still be more," Q objected.

"Perhaps there are, but I don't see any. I do, however, see a large quantity of crushed insect bodies. Now would be a good time to clean them up."

"I don't have a broom or anything like that."

"It might have been a good idea to think of that before jumping on quite so many."

"What, should I have left them alive? I'm thrilled at the notion of one of them crawling into bed with me, believe you me."

"I think you could have handled this entire situation somewhat better."

"Yes, yes, you told me so, I was a bad boy, la la la. Sing a new song, T'Laren, that one's boring me. What can we use to clean up these dead bugs?"

"I'm failing to see why there's a 'we' in that sentence."

"Oh, come _on._ It's not my fault there's bugs in here! The Ferengi brought them!"

"You _did_ drop the bowl."

"And you would have too under the same provocation! Oh, wait, no, I forgot, you're such a _stalwart_ Vulcan. So very, very good at controlling unpleasant emotions like shock and startlement. There's certainly nothing anyone could have done to startle _you_ into behaving badly, is there?"

This was an obvious dig at how she'd behaved toward Sovaz. "The bugs are your responsibility. It'll do you some good to face the consequences of your actions once in a while."

"_My_ actions? Hello? I didn't bring the bugs in here!"

"But you did urinate on one of our captors. And since I'm sure you know nothing about neutralizing scents, removing that particular smell is going to have to be _my_ duty. So you can deal with the bugs."

"We could just rub shoe polish on the spot. Then it'd smell like shoe polish instead of pee."

"That would not be a great improvement."

"Says you. I think anything's an improvement over the smell of human urine."

"Perhaps you should have thought of that before you decided to urinate on the Ferengi."

"You have any familiarity with Earth trickster legends, T'Laren?"

"Some, yes. I've read children's versions of the stories of Coyote and Anansi to Sovaz."

"Oh, well, you might just as well have been reading about Bugs Bunny. The original trickster legends are full of all sorts of repulsive bodily fluids, gender-changing, sordid sexual practices and general havoc with whatever society's established boundaries of good taste were. I have no desire to model myself after them entirely, of course... but that _is_ where the only power I have now lies. I'm willing to put up with a bad smell if I can torment my enemies to the point where they want to be rid of me quickly."

"My sense of smell is rather more acute than yours."

"Waaah. My sense of boredom is _far_ more acute than yours, so I'd say that if we're having a suffering contest, I'm in the lead."

"Q. Get a rag and clean up the bugs."

"I don't _have_ any rags. All I have are my clothes."

"Some of them may as well be rags."

"I'm wounded. The Vulcan who likes to dress in a solid grey ensemble has a poor opinion of my clothing! Whatever shall I do?"

"I would suggest, finding something you _can_ spare to clean bugs with, while I attempt to find some sort of solvent chemical."

"Actually I've got a portable stain remover in the closet. I don't see why it wouldn't work on a stained carpet."

Well. That actually was helpful. "See if you can find it for me, and I'll attempt to locate something you can use for a rag."

"Why do I have a sudden sinking feeling that this is a bad, bad idea?"

"Because you're enamored of your own lack of taste in clothing?"

"_My_ lack of taste?"

"You have a leopard-print loincloth. I will no longer listen to any protestations that you have taste."

He burst out laughing. "Oh, you saw that?"

"Yes. I believe I was permanently scarred by the sight."

"If it makes you feel better I've actually only worn it once. Eleanor had me under house arrest again, and I knew that sooner or later she'd show up to try to harangue me into doing my job, so I put that on to see her reaction when she finally showed up."

"In that case perhaps it would make an excellent rag."

"Oh, you're probably right. Listen, why don't you get the bugs and I'll clean up the stain? I know how to use the device, and since you pointed out I'm less bothered by the smell than you are..."

"Q?"

"Yes?"

"You're cleaning up the bugs. Don't try to get out of it."

"But it would be easier--"

"No, the person with the better sense of smell will be better able to tell when it's actually clean, and besides, you stomped on them, you clean them up."

"What, do you have a phobia of dead insects?"

"I have a phobia of letting you weasel out of your obligations. Clean the bugs, Q."

He sighed. "Yes, Mommy."

* * *

As she worked on cleaning the carpet, she focused on trying to control her emotions. Q had been, for Q, almost conciliatory, even agreeing to use a piece of his precious wardrobe as a rag to clean dead bugs. She, however, had not been able to stop sniping at him. This kind of lack of control was unacceptable. True, Q should not be urinating on their captors. She could see nothing good coming of that. And true, it was very likely that the Ferengi's eventual retaliation would be terrible. But there was no logical point to being afraid. She couldn't do anything about it, no matter what they decided to do. Q wouldn't listen to her, the Ferengi wouldn't listen to her... that still didn't mean there was any point to letting herself get angry.

The door slid open. A Ferengi entered with two covered bowls. This time she could smell that there were vegetables, and no insects. Before the Ferengi had even left, she went over to the bowls and lifted the lids. One bowl was full of salad. The other... her lip twitched before she got her face back under control. The other was a bowl of sliced mushrooms.

"Our breakfast is finally here," she told Q.

"Good, because I'm getting really, really sick of cleaning up bugs." He came over to the low table. "What've we got?"

"I've received a salad. You... have mushrooms."

"_Mushrooms?_ Oh, the horror! How I despise mushrooms! _Blast_ those Ferengi for giving me mushrooms!" Q flung a hand out in a dramatic gesture. "The disgust overwhelms me. I may die!" He dropped the hand. "On the other hand I haven't had anything to eat all day, so I _suppose_, if I _must_, I can _force_ myself to partake of _nasty, disgusting mushrooms_..." He grabbed a handful of the slices and stuffed them in his mouth. "Hmm. You know, I need to rethink my position. It seems that after all this, I don't mind mushrooms at all! But _now_ I'd really hate a cup of coffee."

For a moment T'Laren wished she weren't Vulcan, so she could laugh out loud. It really shouldn't be funny-- Q's histrionics had certainly given away that the two of them knew they were being monitored, if the Ferengi had any brains whatsoever-- but Q had a brilliant sense of comic timing when he felt like using it. Perhaps, after all, it hadn't been such a bad thing that he'd urinated on the Ferengi. She couldn't quite see why he defined what had happened to him as having come out ahead in the encounter, but she'd been telling him all along that he'd feel more self-confidence if he tried to defend himself instead of just curling up and whimpering. Certainly from all she'd heard she wouldn't have expected Q to be in such good spirits after being physically overpowered and force-fed something he was phobic about.

"I, too, would hate a cup of coffee," T'Laren said solemnly. "Even more than I would hate a bunch of grapes."

"Oh, and we all know how much you hate grapes," Q said, grinning. "Want some mushrooms?"

"Yes, I would. Thank you. Would you like some croutons? Or a piece of tomato?"

"Not trying to force-feed me the green stuff?"

"No. The green stuff is for _me._"

"Ah. I see your interest in the welfare of your patient flies out the window when it's your own stomach at stake."

"You're not my patient anymore. I no longer feel obligated to let you share my bell peppers."

"Well, that's good. Because I don't want your bell peppers. Even though I love bell peppers."

Q's mushrooms tasted fine. Delicious, in fact. Her own salad tasted slightly off, as if perhaps it'd been grown on a planet and sprayed with pesticide or preservative or something not-quite-vegetable rather than coming fresh out of a replicator. She resisted the temptation to eat more of Q's mushrooms; she was very hungry, and the Vulcan biological strategy for dealing with low food rations was to want to eat like a pig once food was available, which was making matters worse. There was very little solid in her salad, very little filling; it was rich in vitamins but low in calories, and after having not eaten for an entire day she really could have used more starch than a few small croutons could give her. There was also no protein at all. They hadn't thought to give her a salad with chick peas or lentils in it; they hadn't actually gone into her food menu at all or there'd be at least some Vulcan vegetables in here and probably a whole lot more of it. Salad was so much a meat-eater's notion of what a vegetarian would be eating, anyway. But Q was thinner and at more risk for suffering hunger than she was; she needed to encourage him to eat. She put a few chunks of carrot in his bowl to replace the mushrooms she'd taken and give him something with some vitamins.

T'Laren was finished long before Q. After one last wistful look at his half-eaten bowl of mushrooms, she got up and began inspecting their living quarters, looking to see if all the dead bugs had been cleaned up and if, in fact, all the bugs were actually dead. One or two live ones turned up, which she crushed and then cleaned up with the rag. Many dead ones that Q had missed were strewn all over. "This wasn't a very good cleaning job."

"I wasn't _done._ I thought eating was higher priority."

"If it's higher priority, why are you doing it so slowly?"

He sighed. "Mushrooms, mushrooms, and mushrooms is really an incredibly tedious dish. You want to finish it?"

"Q, you should eat."

"Yeah, I should, but since I'm not going to, you may as well. Give me my rag back, I have strange dead bugs to seek out."

She was about to do so when the ship jerked wildly, throwing him into her, and the lights went out.

Aboard a starship, lights going out was a Bad Thing. An even Worse Thing was the sudden terrible silence, signaling the complete absence of air circulation. She helped Q get off her and onto his knees. "What was that? Are we under attack?" he asked.

"I don't know... I'd expect more shaking around than just that if we were, and the fact that the power is completely out would be strange for a first shot..."

"Oh. No, you're right. I know what's going on." He sounded much more confident. "They were trying to test out our transwarp engines and they blew the crystals. T'Laren, while the power's down they can't monitor us..."

"Of course. Do you need help finding the door?"

"I think I have encountered the concept of darkness once or twice in my existence," he said dryly.

They made their way to the door to the suite. "There's an emergency manual release to the right," she said. "We'll need to find the panel and pull it off."

"Easily done. I already knew where that panel was. I just... yes. Here we go. Urg! How the hell do you get this thing to _budge?_"

"Let me help." T'Laren's fingers found the panel. "There's a trick to it-- yes, here." She pulled on the emergency manual release. The doors banged open loudly.

Outside there was one Ferengi on watch. She heard his feet scuffle on the floor as he turned. "Hey! I'll shoot!"

"I need fresh air!" Q babbled, loudly. "We could _die_ in there! There's no air circulation! I'm claustrophobic-- I can't _take_ being locked up in a tiny room, in the dark! What's happening? You have to tell me!"

While his extremely loud blather was occupying the Ferengi's better-than-Vulcan hearing, T'Laren was gliding as silently as she could toward the very, very faint glow of a heat source. Vulcan vision had less of an infrared component than most of their evolutionary neighbors on their planet, having sacrificed it for better daytime vision, but with her eyes completely dark-adapted she could see just the tiniest bit into the infrared, and that allowed her to see the Ferengi as a very, very dim red glow against the utter blackness. She waited until he spoke.

"Get back into your room, human! I--"

That was all she needed to identify exactly where his head was, and therefore, where his neck was. Her hand reached out and grasped, twisting at the nerve cluster. The Ferengi dropped to the floor.

"There may be others," she said softly. "Be quiet except in emergency; we'll need my ears to navigate."

"Right."

But they had only gotten three feet down the hallway before the lights came back on.

"Damn!" Q whispered harshly. There had been a Ferengi at the end of the hallway, walking toward them; as soon as the lights came on he saw them, and raised his phaser before either of them had a chance to run or dodge.

"Stay right there!" the Ferengi shouted. He tapped his combadge. "I need backup. The prisoners are escaping!"

"We needed air!" Q complained. "The circulation turned off in our quarters! What did you expect us to do?"

"March right back _in_ there, _now!_"

T'Laren could see no point to refusing. At this distance she couldn't possibly reach the Ferengi before he could stun her, and she had been stunned far too many times recently. She backed away and back into the suite, complying. With bad grace Q copied her, grumbling. "Dammit, we were so close..."

Two more Ferengi showed up. "What were you two doing out of your suite?" the taller one asked superciliously.

"I keep saying. We were trying to get some fresh air. There was no circulation in here."

"And that's why Frej is lying on the floor, right?"

"We tripped over him in the dark and he hit his head."

"Do you expect us to believe that, human?"

"I don't care what you believe. But I do expect you to be able to maintain basic standards of care like keeping our _air_ on."

"Computer. Relock door!"

The door slammed shut in their faces. Q flung himself on the couch. "Goddammit."

"We did our best, Q. It wasn't our fault the power came back on so quickly."

"Of course there's going to be no shortage of power failures like that in the future if they keep playing with the transwarp, so I suppose we'll get another chance as long as they're stupid."

"Yes. You did very well, you know. Your patter, at the door? That was exactly the distraction I needed."

"Glad I could help."

She sat down on the couch next to him. "They've already made two sizable mistakes," she said softly, almost whispering. "Logically, it's only a matter of time."

"Oh, I do hope you're right." He sounded sour and disbelieving.

She doubted very much that she'd be able to cajole him out of the dark mood. "Why don't you finish your mushrooms, since we appear to be going nowhere at the moment?"

"I told you. I don't want them. You eat them."

"Very well." Q's mood had obviously taken a dramatic downturn. She wished he could establish some equanimity. This was an unfortunate setback, but it wasn't as if they'd expected the opportunity, either. T'Laren picked up the bowl of mushrooms and ate them hungrily. They really tasted much better than her salad had.

She had finished the mushrooms, and was just about to try to see if she could get Q to do something to get his mind off their situation, when the door opened and three Ferengi with phasers entered. Immediately she tensed. This could be some sort of retribution for the escape attempt, or for the urination thing.

"Human. The Lady Yalit wants to see you in Engineering."

"The Lady Yalit can send people who know what species I belonged to for millions of years, then," Q drawled, making no attempt to get off the couch.

"Or, we could just stun you and drag you there," the second Ferengi said. He was the one who'd caught them in the corridor, and the other two had been involved in Q's fight with the Ferengi this morning.

"That's quite true, but then what would you do with an unconscious lump of human in engineering? You want my mind, you call me by my name. Q. It's only one syllable and it's _very_ easy to spell."

"What makes you think anyone wants you for your mind, human? Maybe Lady Yalit wants something else from you."

Q made a disgusted face. "Heaven forfend. No, I'm pretty sure she wants me to explain to her why the lovely transwarp engine she's just stolen from me does not go. See, I am smart. I can make it go." He said the last two sentences very slowly, with a condescending smirk.

"All right then, _Q_, come with us to Engineering or we'll stun you and drag you," the first Ferengi said.

"Have you any idea what being dragged along a corridor will do to my hair?" Q stood up. "Come on, T'Laren. We've been summoned."

"Not your female!" the first Ferengi barked. "Just you."

"Oh. Well, then, no deal." Q plopped back down on the couch. "T'Laren stays with me."

"Q, there is actually most likely nothing I would be able to do to protect you in this situation," T'Laren said. There was no point in whispering. If she pitched her voice loud enough that Q could hear her, the Ferengi would hear as well.

"Protect _me?_" He looked taken aback for a second.

Why did that surprise him? Wasn't that why he wanted her to come along?... unless it was simply for moral support. "It would be better to avoid being stunned and dragged off."

"Whatever, T'Laren." He turned back to the Ferengi. "Do you want me to cooperate or no?"

"Your female is staying right here."

"Well, then so am I."

"Q, there isn't actually anything I can _do_ for you that is worth running the risk of being stunned. And I would rather not go to Engineering." The thought of being out in a public place, surrounded by the Ferengi, where she wouldn't have any room to defend herself if one of them decided he wanted to grope her, and where Q would have to devote his attention to dealing with their head captor and so she would not be able to draw his attention to her if there was a problem... She would endure, if it happened. But it didn't appeal.

"You don't want to come with me."

"No, to be honest I would rather not. I am not an engineer-- there will be little I can do. And I suspect Yalit will not talk to me either." A woman who gained power in such a sexist society didn't tend to do it by having warm sisterly feelings toward other women.

Q gave her an unreadable look. "Fine." He got up. "Take me to your leader."

He was probably offended, but there was nothing she could do about that. He had to save his ammunition for the big battles, which meant she couldn't let him expend his energy on the small stuff like this.

After he left with the Ferengi, she began going through her exercise routines-- she was going to have to become accustomed to moving in clothing that was too large for her if they were to get another chance.

* * *

So she didn't want his protection. Okay, she didn't realize she needed it, but did she have to undermine him in front of the Ferengi? If they molested her while he was gone it was only what she deserved for preventing him from stopping it. No matter how many times Q declared this to himself, however, it didn't reduce his nervousness.

Nothing he could do. He let himself breathe, evenly, calmly, knowing that pretending to feel an emotion was the closest he could approach to actually changing his emotional state. The nervousness would not go away if he pretended it wasn't there, but it would lessen to the point where he could sincerely ignore it.

He had the upper hand here. Yalit would never be able to figure out how the hell Lhoviri's jury-rigged transwarp drive worked, never having been exposed to a working drive using proper fuel. It took the knowledge and experience of a Q to screw up technology quite this badly, and it would take the same to disentangle the situation. He wasn't _happy_ with the idea of letting Yalit know anything whatsoever about transwarp-- he'd refused to work on transwarp for the Federation, for good reasons having to do with maintaining the balance of power in the Alpha Quadrant-- but he could use this to leverage his return to the Federation, as well as better treatment while he was here, and once he had that arranged he could have Yalit arrested for kidnapping, at which point her knowledge of transwarp mechanics would not do her much good.

They led him into engineering, to a small office on the side of the engineering room. Yalit was in the office, still naked, sitting in a very tall chair. “Brill, Yark—you can leave Q here.” She gestured them out. They didn’t argue with her, just obeyed.

“I see you’ve got these two better trained than the one who whined about you offending your womanhood, on _Yamato_,” Q needled.

Yalit ignored him. “I want information from you.”

“About how to work the transwarp drive? And duplicate it, so you can sell it to the highest bidder?” Q smirked at her. “Your incompetence with it was obvious when the power went out.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You just don’t learn, do you,” she said, leaning forward with a scowl on her face. “You’re in my power here, Q. Your obnoxious mouth won’t save you. I can do anything I want to you.”

“But you won’t, because I’m too valuable for you to risk my life. So let’s skip the posturing and get to the deal-making, shall we? I hear you Ferengi are supposed to be good at that.”

“Fine.” She smiled tightly, thin-lipped.

Q sat on her desk. “I can solve your little transwarp problem for you. In fact I’m the only one who can, since the reason it doesn’t work the way you think it should is because my brother screwed around with it, and I’m the only one who knows what he did and can compensate for it. But it’s going to cost you.”

“Oh, really.”

“Yes, really. First of all, I want replicator access restored for myself and T’Laren. We can’t feed ourselves, wash, get clothes that fit—the situation is absolutely intolerable and I won’t stand for it.” He stood up and circled around to Yalit’s chair, leaning on it as he looked down at her. “Secondly, you ransom us back to the Federation. They’ll pay exorbitantly to get me back, I’m quite sure. There’s no need to start a bidding war. Thirdly, you give us access to the gym and swimming pool—supervised, of course, I’m quite aware you’re not going to let us run around the ship unescorted, but since you won’t give us computer access we’re bored out of our minds.”

Yalit’s smile grew broader. “Here’s my counteroffer. You do what I tell you to, when I tell you to, and you give me any information I ask for, or I have you sedated and kept in stasis where you can’t kill yourself until I have a chance to sell you off to the highest bidder, I don’t even include the Federation in the bidding, and I give your girlfriend to my sons to do what they want with until we have a chance to sell her to the Romulans for their breeding projects. How’s that sound?”

Q straightened up, almost involuntarily backing away from Yalit, as cold terror spread through him. For a moment he couldn’t speak. He wanted to hit Yalit, to wipe that cold smile off her face, but he’d never hit anyone in anger before and he wasn’t about to start now, not with so much at stake. He forced his own face back from wide-eyed shock to something more controlled and calculating. “Well, then you wouldn’t have transwarp, would you. As much as you could get for selling me on the open market, you’d certainly get more for selling me _and_ a working transwarp drive.”

“That’s a financial risk I’m willing to take. It’s your life, Q, you and your woman’s. Are you willing to take that risk?”

He matched her cold smile. It was a lie; his heart was pounding and he could feel rivulets of cold sweat break out on the back of his neck. But he was very, very accomplished at using his body language to lie. “And if I kill myself hours after my new owners take possession, I imagine they’d be really quite unhappy with _you._ I know your Rules of Acquisition have something to say about no refunds, but what are you going to do if, say, the entire Romulan government is enraged with you for selling them a bill of goods?”

“I _could_ always sell you to one of the people who wants you dead anyway. I’ve had a few choice offers from the Tätarians, and a nice bid from the Ceuli.”

The cold terror intensified. It was an effort to keep breathing normally. He did it anyway, deliberately leaning over her again as he had before. “You could. But the thing about nearly everyone who wants me dead is that they don’t just want me _dead_; they want me to go through _their_ execution ritual. So again, if I kill myself right after being handed over to them, they don’t get their money’s worth, and they come after you. Do you _know_ what Ceulan execution rituals consist of? Do you know that ripping them off financially is a crime they’re willing to kill for? Now, if you’re eager to have your chest cut open and your heart ripped out while you’re still alive, by all means sell me to the Ceuli. Nothing could make me happier than to know my death will cause yours.” He took a step away from her, leaning back against the wall, the picture of insouciance. “Or, we could come to an arrangement. You want transwarp—and you’d rather I _didn’t_ off myself before whoever you sell me to thinks they’ve gotten their money’s worth. I want protection for T’Laren and some basic sentient rights. You either deal, or neither of us get what we want, and as a Ferengi I’d think you’d be a _marginally_ better negotiator than _that._”

“You’d really see your woman sold into slavery and yourself killed if I don’t give you access to _a swimming pool?_”

“Well, no, I’m willing to make a few small concessions. Tell you what. If you absolutely refuse to give us replicator access, then you have T’Laren’s clothes moved into my quarters. We give you a list of basic amenities, and you replicate them and hand them over so we can take showers and brush our _teeth._ You feed us decent food, on a regular schedule. You include the Federation as one of the bidding partners when you auction me off, and you hand T’Laren over to the Federation before you hand me over to whoever’s buying. Unless, obviously, you sell me back to the Federation, in which case you can hand us over at the same time. In exchange, I’ll help you figure out this transwarp thing, and graciously refrain from killing myself, _if_ you don’t sell me to someone who wants me dead anyway.”

“I could beat transwarp out of you,” she said softly.

“Without me killing myself? Not likely,” he snorted. “A race of godlike entities couldn’t get me to do what they wanted. What makes you think you could come close without making it worth my while to cooperate?”

All she needed to do was call his bluff about killing himself. He was gambling everything, and he knew it. His mouth had gone completely dry with fear, and it was an effort of will not to shake. Posturing as if he had the upper hand when in fact Yalit had just proven she had him over a barrel was taking everything he had. But if he gave in, if he didn’t try to force any concessions out of her whatsoever, then she’d know he really did have no power, and then she could do anything to him and to T’Laren, anything at all.

Yalit looked at him for several long moments, piggy little eyes narrowed, assessing him. Waiting for him to crack. An overwhelming urge to sweeten the deal, to offer her more enticements so she’d take it, swept him. He ignored it. He _had_ to pretend he had the power here or neither his life nor T’Laren’s would be worth living. He simply lounged back against the wall, studying her just as intently, behaving for all the world as if all this was of merely academic interest to him.

“Let’s do this,” Yalit said. “I give your woman her clothes back, after searching them for any weaponry. I give you the amenities _I_ think you need based on the guesting guidelines for humans and Vulcans in the computer. I’ll give you the food on time, and I’ll include the Federation in the auction. And once I’ve sold a working transwarp drive, I’ll hand your woman back to the Federation. But if I can’t sell transwarp, I’ll sell _her_ to the Romulans.”

“I hardly think T’Laren should be punished if you turn out to be an incompetent saleswoman. Transwarp ought to sell itself.”

“Then you won’t be worried.”

“No, because you can get a financial benefit out of dragging your feet on selling transwarp until after I’m gone. No. You guarantee T’Laren’s safe return to the Federation or you get nothing from me. I’ll work with you in any reasonable manner to make sure you’ve got a saleable product, with fuel requirements you pathetic Alpha Quadrant mortals can actually meet, but T’Laren isn’t negotiable. She goes back to the Federation or there’s no deal.” This wasn’t pure altruism on his part; it would be easier for the Ferengi to hand both himself and T’Laren over at the same time, and demanding that T’Laren be returned to the Federation as a condition of the deal made the Federation a more attractive customer and the Romulans a less attractive one. But if he were honest with himself, that wasn’t a very large part of his motivation. Having come up against a Romulan telepath, and having read some of that telepath’s memories, he knew that Vulcans were useful to Romulans as captive breeders; half-Vulcan children would be telepaths and could be used in the Tal Shiar as elite agents like tr’Sahlassiu had been, though he’d been a full Romulan throwback and not part Vulcan. He couldn’t imagine any circumstances under which being forced to bear children who’d then be taken away to be raised by your captors could not be a hellish life. If Yalit wouldn’t bend on that… well, she had to. She wouldn’t risk losing her money on transwarp; T’Laren couldn’t possibly be as valuable as transwarp if for no better reason than that transwarp could be sold many times.

Yalit studied him again. He met her eyes hard, without blinking.

“All right. You make sure I have a product I can sell, and your girlfriend will be returned to the Federation when I sell you.”

“How generous of you,” he said sarcastically. He pushed off from the wall. “Now, if we’re done here, _I_ want a shower with the proper amenities, and coffee. Bring me back to my room, prove your goodwill by giving me what I’ve asked for in terms of showering supplies, T’Laren’s clothes, and a pot of coffee, and I’ll get to work for you.”

“How about you get to work right now, and I have those things sent to your room?”

“Nope. You pretend to be a scientist, you ought to know better. I don’t work without coffee. And I _won’t_ work while smelling like I haven’t had a decent shower in two days. You want to use my brain, you keep it in good operating condition.”

“Well, I suppose my boys won’t want to put up with your human stink anyway. So fine. But you’d better be useful, or you’re going into stasis and your woman’s going to the Romulans.”

“Oh, please. Would I be worth what I am if I weren’t more fantastically useful than _you_ can imagine how to take advantage of?”

“You could be highly overrated, and fooling everyone.”

“Don’t confuse me with you. The Federation is full of real scientists, unlike the Ferengi Alliance. I couldn’t have kept my reputation up more than a few weeks if I couldn’t back it up. And besides, who proved the nature of the anomaly back on _Yamato_? I rest my case.”

“Brill! Yark! Take this arrogant human back to his room.”

“Don’t forget. Showering amenities, T’Laren’s clothes, and coffee. Or else you get nothing from me.”

“I haven’t forgotten. No matter how stupid you think I am, I wouldn’t be where _I_ am without brains, and you’d best remember it.”

“Try to prove it to me, then,” Q shot back, and followed his escorts back to his room.

* * *

T’Laren was removing things from the room replicator when he came in. She turned. “We have toiletries. Is this your doing?”

“Let’s just say I cut a deal,” Q said, making a beeline for the replicator. “What’ve we got so far?”

“Shampoo, body wash, odor suppressors…” The replicator’s “I just made something” noise bleeped, and she reached in and took it. “Beard repressor. For you, I’d imagine.” She handed it to him.

“What, Vulcan women have hairy armpits?”

“Vulcan women see little logic in removing body hair when living in cold, human-normal environments. We also have a hairbrush.”

He inspected the hairbrush. “This is obviously a sophisticated implement of torture.”

“It’s a hairbrush.”

“It’s a device to facilitate going bald. Fortunately I have hairbrushes of my own. What about tooth cleaners?”

“One. It’s a sonic device.”

“That’s still disgusting. There had better be another one. We are _not_ sharing a tooth cleaner.”

“It’s a sonic device, Q. It never actually comes in contact with any part of your mouth.”

“Maybe yours doesn’t, but I like my teeth to actually be clean? Oh, there we go.” He took the second tooth cleaner out of the replicator and picked up the shampoo. “Damn. This is for water showers.”

“_Ketaya_ has water shower capability.”

“Yes, but water showers are disgusting.”

“There’s nothing disgusting about water, Q. You drink it.”

“It doesn’t actually _clean_ you. Plus the temperature controls are always intemperate and ill-controlled.”

“Do you truly think you can get them to give us cleansers for sonics instead? These are typical Ferengi hotel supplies, Q, and the Ferengi don’t use sonic showers. Water’s too plentiful on Ferenginar and they’re too dependent on frequent humidification.”

He didn’t really think he could push his luck with Yalit. “I’ll live, I suppose. But if they’re not going to give us stuff for sonic showers they better give us towels.”

“They will. As I said, these are standard hotel supplies for human or Vulcan guests. See, here are the washcloths.”

“How are we supposed to function with only four washcloths?”

“I suppose they’ll have to replenish them on occasion. I wonder if they will make any provision to allow us to wash our clothes, or if they’ll give us clothing from the replicator.”

“Or they can always do our laundry for us,” Q said pointedly at the ceiling, loudly. He picked up the shampoo, the body wash, the odor suppressors, the beard repressor—which he was in dire need of; there was nothing more repulsive about the male human body than its incessant need to grow ape-like hairs all over its face—and one of the washcloths. “I’m going to take a shower. When the towels come out, throw them in the bathroom for me. I’ll leave the door unlocked.”

He made sure to adjust the temperature of the water before he actually got in the shower—after his first hellish experience with a water shower, that wasn’t exactly something he’d forget, ever—and then, once he was in, slumped down in the back, letting the water hit him in the chest and stomach and sluice down. The shakes took him then, hard. He closed his eyes, breathing in the hot mist from the water, trying desperately not to start crying, but he couldn’t control the violent trembling in his body any longer, and he didn’t try. He’d learned the hard way that while he could hide his emotions as much as he wanted, if he didn’t find some outlet for them eventually he’d lose the ability to hide them at all, and he’d crack. And he couldn’t safely do that here. His demand for a shower had been more about needing a few minutes in privacy where he could let the fear out than about anything else.

Aside from moments when death had seemed imminent, he hadn’t been this scared since the time he thought Starfleet Security would kill him. He had been managing thus far to mostly avoid being terrified—angry, deeply annoyed, somewhat troubled, but not terrified. The Ferengi were so laughable, it hadn’t entirely sunk in that he was a prisoner of someone who hated him and would go out of her way to harm him. He’d been more upset for T’Laren than for himself, and even at that had been more angry at the way they were treating her than afraid.

It was sinking in now. They could do anything to him. Anything at all. Or anything to her. This wasn’t a joke, this wasn’t a minor annoyance. He was a _prisoner._ Yalit _might_ be money-grubbing enough to keep him alive and unhurt long enough to sell him off… or she might not. And she would probably _prefer_ not to sell him to the Federation. The knowledge that she’d actually made inquiries of species that wanted him painfully dead deeply shook him. She'd have had to do some research; there was no way any of his enemies could know where he was this soon, so they hadn't contacted Yalit, she had obviously contacted them. She _wanted_ to sell him to someone who would torture him to death. His breathing grew ragged. No. He wasn't going to cry. It would be too obvious, without extensive use of cosmetics to hide it and he didn’t have time to put them on.

He'd thought he was doing so well. He'd successfully won his small victory today, he'd even gotten them to give them decent food... but he couldn't win. Yalit held far too much of the power here. Essentially he was a slave now; she could do as she liked to him without even the thin protection being a Federation citizen had given him from Anderson's heavy-handed tactics. His only hope was to cooperate.

Except, he suddenly realized, he couldn’t do that, either.

He had to assume that Lhoviri sending T'Laren to him meant he'd been forgiven for helping humanity fight off the Borg. But he wasn't going to be so lucky twice. Transwarp was a technology he'd refused to give the Federation for reasons of personal ethics and Q law; they had tried, on occasion, to pressure him into it, but because they had their own Prime Directive to compare to, he had successfully managed to resist the pressure and get them to back down. In some ways giving Yalit the technology was actually preferable, since the fact that she'd sell it to everyone meant that the power imbalance giving it to just one nation would cause would be ameliorated. But it wasn't technology any of these people were ready for.

For one thing, Thetaran warp drives would be very attractive to the Borg, who currently needed to generate static transwarp corridors and maintain them with an elaborate system of hubs and gates, and would love to get their hands on dynamic transwarp. Q knew, even if the Federation didn't, that the virus he'd helped them develop would have done serious damage to the Borg and convince them to leave the Federation alone for the indefinite future, but couldn't have actually destroyed the species. And something like dynamic transwarp would get the Borg to come back into the Alpha Quadrant despite having been burned two years ago.

Then there was the fact that the Federation used the development of warp as their standard to determine what species were equals, who could be traded or treated with, and what species were primitives that needed to be left alone. What changes might the development of transwarp herald? It was already true that the Alpha/Beta Quadrant powers-- the Federation, the Romulans, the Klingons, the Cardassians, and to a much lesser extent the Ferengi-- all had a generally higher standard of technology than smaller, non-aligned powers, with the exception of such outliers as the Tholians. Having transwarp would set these species even further ahead, and leave the smaller, less technologically advanced species further in the dust, effectively killing their chances of advancing to be quadrant powers themselves if they didn't ally with one of the others. The Federation would be more effective at its own insidious form of assimilation; the Klingons and Cardassians might start dreaming of empire again. The Romulans would be the most dangerous, as their quantum singularity drives could be most easily retrofitted to work with transwarp, but there was already a full-time Q assigned to maintaining the Romulans as a destabilized, chaotic power and cleaning up the temporal messes they made due to the chrono-warping nature of their tech. The Continuum, or at least his brother with oversight of the Romulans, would be _deeply_ unhappy with him for letting the Romulans spread their temporal anomalies even farther through the galaxy.

And he couldn't rely on the notion that he could give Yalit transwarp and then expect the Federation to arrest her and thus keep her technology under control. Firstly, if he wasn't handed over to the Federation then the Federation likely _wouldn't_ arrest her, and secondly, he didn't trust the Federation. Yalit would offer them transwarp to cut a deal, and he'd be forced into the position of seeing her walk free after kidnapping him or else giving the Federation transwarp himself.

But. If he didn't work with Yalit on transwarp, he'd be sold into slavery or torturous death, with no actual recourse-- as much as he wished his bluff were true right now, he couldn't actually kill himself with his mind, and after he'd seen how effective the Federation was at stopping him from killing himself he was desperately afraid that anyone who enslaved him would even more easily be able to prevent him from doing it. And T'Laren would be turned into some sort of brood cow for the Tal Shiar. He couldn't allow that to happen. He owed her too much.

This was all Lhoviri's fault, he thought hotly. Lhoviri had put a working Thetaran drive in this boat. Yalit wouldn't be demanding transwarp from him if there wasn't a semi-working transwarp drive right in front of her. He was only human, they couldn't seriously expect him to throw his life away for the sake of maintaining Q ethics-- and not just his life, but someone else's as well. And yet, he was fairly sure that was exactly what they _would_ expect from him. The Q weren't known for taking the circumstances into account. And he wouldn't be allowed to stand trial and point out that really this was all Lhoviri's fault; they wouldn't even contact him, they'd just... never take him back. Perhaps even kill him, though a clean death at the hands of the Continuum was preferable to the other alternatives facing him. There was no point to living if they would never take him back. He'd almost rather be tortured to death. It would get it over with faster; living as a mortal with no hope of ever going home _would_ be torture.

He didn't know what to do. He felt completely helpless.

No, he did know what to do. He had no choice. He'd work with Yalit, because the Q would give him enough rope to hang himself. Only at the point where she actually sold off the technology and destabilized the mortal powers around here would they invoke his punishment. Whereas if he outright refused, she would immediately have him thrown into stasis and he'd have no opportunity to escape until after he was already in the hands of whoever would end up buying him. He had to play for time. Maybe there'd be a way to stop Yalit from keeping the information...

...no. No, better idea. Maybe he could just _lie._ Yalit was no great shakes as a physicist, and Q had discovered long ago he could mislead better minds than hers. He'd give her something, all right, but it wouldn't be true-- and meanwhile she'd be trying to close a deal, and meanwhile he and T'Laren could work on escaping, and maybe he could get Yalit to accidentally blow the crystals once or twice more to kill the power so he and T'Laren could get away. It was dangerous, but it was the best shot he had.

He got out of the shower and got dressed. Being clean and free of unpleasant smells and facial stubble was a great help. The coffee he found waiting for him outside the shower was black, which was repulsive, but it was still coffee, so he drank it. He'd badly needed it; the adrenaline of his confrontation with Yalit had worn off, and the reaction to that, as well as the fact that he hadn't slept at all last night, was starting to drag him down again.

"They've brought me my clothes," T'Laren said, sounding surprised. "What did you offer them?"

"Transwarp," he said shortly. "They're trying to figure out how that screwed-up drive Lhoviri put in works. I've offered to help them, in exchange for some small concessions."

"Is that wise? The Ferengi do not strike me as the appropriate holders of highly advanced transwarp technology."

"Me neither, but I haven't got a lot of choices here. Anyway, I'm sure Yalit will end up selling it to _everyone_, so it's not like we're going to see a power imbalance." He didn't mention all of the other very good reasons it was a bad idea. He couldn't tell T'Laren what he was actually doing in front of the Ferengi monitoring them.

"Still, I think it's a matter for concern."

"Who's the former god here, you or me? Trust me, I know more about issues of species' accessing advanced technology than your Federation _ever_ will. I don't suggest you try this at home, but I _do_ know what I'm doing."

"I hope so," she said, sounding troubled. He didn't blame her. He was troubled, too. But he didn't want to worry her by telling her how high the stakes were; there was nothing T'Laren could do to protect herself, and he'd already seen that her much-vaunted Vulcan control wasn't doing her much good when it came to her feelings about things like being sexually harassed. Telling her that if he didn't behave himself Yalit would sell her to the Romulans as a breeding slave struck him as something that would bother her rather more than being groped by the Ferengi here, and he didn't want to put that burden on her when there was nothing she could do about it.

His Ferengi escort entered the room. "See? You have all the things you asked for, human," the first one sneered. "Now the Lady Yalit wants to see you in engineering."

"Fine. Let's go see if you Ferengi have any capacity to understand elementary physics at all. My bet's on 'no.'"

Q followed them back to engineering.

* * *

While Q was gone, T'Laren set about folding and putting away her clothes. She didn't have many-- she tended to rely on the replicators-- but having any at all made her greatly relieved. The replicator had also produced a solvent for cleaning clothes with sonics, and she took Q's and her own outfits from yesterday and the overlarge clothing of Q's she'd been wearing today and cleaned them in the sonic shower. She had to be somewhat grateful that the Ferengi used sonics to wash their clothes, at least; washing clothes with water would have been massively inefficient.

Lunch showed up while she was working. It simply came out of the replicator, no need to have guards enter the room. She'd wondered how long it would take them to realize how much safer that was for them. This time it was plomeek soup and garlic bread, a big improvement over salad. However, the same slightly nasty aftertaste was present in this meal as had been in her salad. She wondered if she were coming down with an illness that made most of her food taste off, or if there was a problem with the replicator. Ferengi ate mushrooms; maybe Q's mushrooms had been fresh, and the unpleasant aftertaste was a replicator side effect.

She dumped Q's used towels down the disposal chute and was gratified to see new towels appear in the replicator. They were definitely running a Ferengi hotel program; such programs conserved both replicator energies and the cost of maid service by expecting guests to dispose of their own used linens, and generating new ones only when they registered that the old ones had gone down the disposal. Unfortunately, since Q's bedsheets weren't replicated, they couldn't get fresh ones and would have to wash them. Q could do that himself, though. T'Laren was willing to clean up a bit to keep their captivity bearable, but she wasn't going to be Q's maid-- especially not when surrounded by people who probably expected her to do exactly that on the basis of her genitalia. She would, however, clean the blanket Q had provided her with.

As she finished that up, and came back out into the suite looking for something else to do, the door opened and three Ferengi came in. One was the fellow she'd almost managed to nerve-pinch by tricking him into thinking she'd do sexual favors for him. She didn't recognize the other two, and wondered how many Ferengi were _on_ this ship. Or, presumably, their own ship. The Ferengi ship must be staying with _Ketaya_; there wasn't enough room aboard _Ketaya_ for the number of different Ferengi she'd seen.

"Your boyfriend asked our grandmother about using the swimming pool," one of them said, a goofy grin on his face. "We saw you like to keep in _shape._ Did you wanna go swimming?"

This was transparent. They'd been watching her exercise, and they wanted to see her in a swimsuit. A totally disproportionate surge of anger nearly overwhelmed her, but she forced it down before it reached her face. Anger, at their voyeurism? How illogical. It was understandable to be angry when they molested her or dismissed her opinions, but if they were offering her a chance to exercise, the fact that their ulterior motive was to leer at her in a swimsuit was irrelevant. "Yes, actually, I'd find that very helpful. Are you offering to escort me?"

"Oh, yeah," the one she'd almost tricked said, practically drooling. "We can take you swimming."

"You need to understand, then, that I am not free to share... favors... with any of you. I am under Q's protection and he has specifically requested that I do no such thing." If there had only been one, or perhaps even two, she might have used a sexual offer to trick them and then overpower them. With three, any such attempt would not succeed, and she had no desire to actually be molested. It rather galled her that she had to invoke Q's name to protect herself, but people who saw women as property would be much more inclined to leave women alone if they thought of them as belonging to other men. "If you are offering to take me swimming, I would certainly expect you to keep me under guard, and... watch me." What she was saying disgusted her far, far more than it should. Where was her control? She'd done worse than this in her life. Inviting Ferengi to watch her while she swam wasn't nearly on a par with sleeping with a Romulan so he would ignore any possible holes in her cover story, let alone what she'd had to do at the end to get away safely. "But I am concerned that if you touched me it would anger Q enough that he would kill himself, and I can't allow that."

"No, no," the first one said. "We'll just... watch you, while you swim. So you don't get away. Your man can't object to you getting some exercise, can he?" He idly reached up and ran finger and thumb over the edge of his earlobe. A wave of violent emotion, the desire to break in his face with her fist, rip at his earlobe until it tore off, surged through her. Control. She forced it down again. Maintaining her physical conditioning was extremely important if she was to have a hope of getting herself and Q out of here. Ferengi could fondle their earlobes all they wanted; it didn't touch her. It _wouldn't_ touch her. Why was she having a hard time with this?

"Then allow me to change." She ruffled through her pile of clothing to get her swimsuit.

"You could change right here, we wouldn't mind," the second one she didn't recognize piped up.

She gave him a hard look, letting just the tiniest fraction of the rage she felt show in her eyes. "No. I will change in the bathroom. Escort me when I come out."

Her swimsuit was reasonably decorous—one piece, streamlined—and under most circumstances it wouldn’t enter her mind that it was immodest in any way. In this case, though, she found herself wishing for a full-body covering suitable for swimming. She forced the embarrassment down. _No one can humiliate you without your consent. I need only choose not to feel humiliated, and there is nothing then that they can do to me._ She really did need the exercise.

The Ferengi stared at her as she came out. T’Laren was surprised they weren’t drooling. _Don’t their own women run around nude in their homes? Why is a lightly clad woman so interesting to them?_ But then, it was probably precisely because she _wasn’t_ Ferengi that it mattered to them. She deliberately gave them only the most cursory of glances and then didn’t bother to look back, keeping her eyes focused on the path to the swimming pool.

Once she was at the pool, she dove in on the deep end and began swimming as hard as she could. The pool was unusually cold today; she was usually better acclimated to human-normal temperatures than this. Perhaps the Ferengi had lowered the temperature, since it was somewhat chillier on Ferenginar than most humans preferred. She made the mistake of glancing up, once, and saw her captors stroking their own earlobes, eyes fixed on her. It didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter. She pushed herself—how long could she go without having to take a breath? How quickly could she do a lap? How quickly could she do one while holding her breath?

She hadn’t had time to get out of shape—she was just as fast, just as strong a swimmer, as she’d been before. Somehow this wasn’t challenging her enough. There was too much anger in her, too much emotion to force down, and no matter how hard she focused on her swimming it wasn't hard enough, physical enough, exhausting enough. The anger was still there. It was absurd. T'Laren had actually had _sex_ with a target on an intelligence mission, after years of nothing except sharing Soram's _pon farr._ The fact that some annoying little cretins were enjoying themselves watching her swim should mean absolutely nothing. Why couldn't she overcome this anger? It wasn't even fear. If it was fear that they might take things farther than just watching, she could understand why it was so hard to master. But no, she wasn't afraid of that. The thought that they might try to rape her just filled her with righteous fury and a profound desire to do physical violence. No fear at all. Why anger, then? What was wrong with her?

After an hour she realized that she simply was not going to be able to swim hard enough to overcome the anger, not while the Ferengi were still watching. She climbed out of the pool and stalked over to them. "Return me to Q's quarters."

"You sure? You could swim a little while longer…"

"Yes. Return me now." She started for the door, expecting them to follow her. They were supposedly keeping her prisoner, after all. It would be rather bad for them if she managed to get enough of a head start on them that she could run and hide. Though it was a nice fantasy.

They followed her back to Q's quarters, leering and giggling to themselves. Once she was inside the quarters, she turned toward the Ferengi. "Thank you for allowing me access to the swimming pool." She then turned around and proceeded to completely ignore them. For a few seconds they hovered in the doorway before they finally got the idea that the show was over, and left. The door shut behind them. Experimentally T'Laren tried the manual door opening. It didn't work, and she hadn't really expected it to.

She didn't take a shower. She felt on edge, still angry, still full of restless energy. A long shower with water might help her to overcome the anger but would do nothing for the energy. She was jumping out of her skin. T'Laren changed to her workout clothes and used the center of the room to do first stretching, then aerobic exercises, and then martial arts katas. At first she performed the katas slowly, the way they were supposed to be done, controlled gestures to practice proper form, discipline and self-mastery. It didn't last. The aerobics hadn't taken the edge off.

She began doing her katas faster, harder, kicking and striking blows as if she were on a holodeck fighting hologram opponents no one else could see. The thought occurred to her that the Ferengi were probably watching her exercise-- if her swim had excited them so much, she was sure the exercise in skimpy workout clothes wasn't much better. A sudden spike of fury overwhelmed her. Let them watch. Let them learn what she could do, if they approached her too closely. She began envisioning them as opponents, seeing Ferengi in her mind's eye, striking out at them. She aimed for eyes, and lobes, high kicks to the head, low brutal kicks to the genitals. Hard chops to the throat. She didn't know if they could tell that her imaginary opponents were Ferengi rather than more average-sized humanoids, but it didn't matter. If she couldn't control the emotion through meditation or through exhausting herself alone, she would do it through catharsis.

It was easily another hour later when she came back to herself. Breathing hard, all muscles protesting and exhausted, she finally felt somewhat more at peace. The anger was still there, would come back if she dwelled on it, but she could lock it away with meditation now. She went into the bathroom and got into the shower, reveling in the feel of water as hot as she could stand it sluicing over her. Her skin sang at the touch of water, reveling in it the way humans apparently reveled in fur. Physical exhaustion and the pleasure of hot water dancing over her body finally let her relax. It felt as if she hadn't been able to do that in days. Which was, logically, ridiculous, as they'd only been kidnapped yesterday.

When she was done, and wearing her regular clothes again, she went to the bedroom of the suite to sit on the floor and meditate. It worked this time; she managed to completely blot out the passage of time until Q finally showed up, looking completely strung out and exhausted. He flung himself on the couch, sprawling with one arm over his eyes.

"How about you bring me my slippers and the paper?" he said.

"I haven't got a paper to bring you. Do you actually have slippers?"

"Yes, but it was a joke. Though if you're volunteering… I have had a _really_ hard day." He kicked off his boots.

"I have a better idea." She came over to sit next to him on the couch. "Either sit up or turn over, and I'll rub your back."

"You know, that is actually the best idea I've heard all day?" He sat up and looked at her. "Sometimes life is actually not a complete, unrelieved hell. Who knew?"

She slid next to him on the couch and reached up to his neck. His skin was cool, like summer rain on a hot day. T'Laren blinked-- that mental analogy was very odd. Yet it seemed somehow reassuring, relaxing and pleasant, to touch him. And gratifying, how easily he responded to the easing of pain. Q moaned and almost fell backward against the couch, as if collapsing into her touch. "You cannot possibly imagine how desperately I need this."

"The muscles behaving as if akin to titanium cable was something of a clue, however."

"Oh, I guess so. Mmm. Did you know the Ferengi are even stupider than they look?"

"Indeed?"

"Yalit has some intelligence-- maybe a spoonful or two of brains in that head-- but she's spent so long channeling it into nothing but the gruesome pursuit of profit that it's ossified to scientific ideas. And _none_ of her sons have the slightest capacity for higher thought. It's really disturbing to imagine that these people managed to build a warp drive in the first place. I'm guessing someone sold it to them, actually."

"Yes, that’s understood to be the case. Are all of these people Yalit's children?"

"Not directly, no, but they're all apparently either her sons, her grandsons, and possibly her great-grandsons. Which hardly surprises me. If you're Ferengi and you're taking orders from a woman, I imagine you'd _need_ to keep that in the family or it could get scandalous."

"She has an impressively large family."

"Not shocked. Building up an impressively large family is probably the only reason why a somewhat intelligent being would go live in a place where she's expected to be naked and subservient. Personally I think she'd have been better off becoming wealthy off her inventions _first_ and then paying some studly young Ferengi boy to be her breeding partner without ever actually going back to her homeworld, but who knows, maybe the whole subservience thing gives her a little thrill. Oh, yes. Right there. Ooohh."

"Did you actually ask her to arrange for me to be allowed to swim? That was very thoughtful of you."

He stiffened slightly. "I did… but I thought she said no." He turned his head. "How did you know? Did they…?"

"Three of the Ferengi came and offered to escort me to the swimming pool. Given the need I have to keep to an exercise regimen, I accepted."

Q stood up abruptly and spun on his heel to look down at her. "Are you _insane?_"

T'Laren blinked. "What?"

He threw his hands in the air. "Why am I doing all this to protect you if you just stroll off into the woods with any big bad wolf that offers to let you get some exercise? You wouldn't come with me to engineering, you let three Ferengi drag you off to god knows where--"

"One needn't invoke the knowledge of a deity. It was a swimming pool."

"Yeah, and when they said, 'Hey, little Vulcan girl, want some candy?' you were actually stupid enough to _believe_ them?"

"As you see, I was left unmolested."

"That's luck compensating for near-criminal stupidity!"

She stood up as well. If she was going to have an argument with Q it was better to do so on an equal footing. "I didn't think the level of threat they posed was sufficient to justify refusing. Particularly since they _could_ have simply walked into this room and stunned me if they were willing to risk you killing yourself in retaliation."

"And that's why you should have come with me to engineering! What'd you think, I was asking you to come with me because _I_ was scared of the big bad Ferengi?"

"I didn't see how it would be preferable to be surrounded by them in close quarters while you needed all your concentration to negotiate with Yalit."

"But you thought it was a good idea to go _swimming_ with them?"

"I did not go swimming _with_ them. They remained on the side of the pool."

"And I'm sure they had the best of intentions and were perfect gentlemen."

"No, of course not. They extended the invitation so they could watch a woman in a swimsuit. I'm well aware of this. However, it would be illogical for me to be overly concerned with voyeurism. They cannot harm me simply by looking at me."

"They can damn well harm you by _raping_ you, T'Laren. Or giving you that drug you were talking about. You are _such_ a Federation citizen!"

"What do you mean by that?"

"The whole universe doesn't operate by Federation ideals! We haven't got anyone guaranteeing us basic sentient rights here, and no matter how many pretty speeches we deliver about the dignity of sentient life, these _creatures_ are perfectly willing to treat us as non-people. You _can't_ expect to keep yourself safe if you go waltzing off with them anytime they make you a nice offer!"

"Believe me, Q, I am far better acquainted with the dangers that face a woman in this universe than you are."

"You sure about that? I've spent millions of years watching sentient beings prey on each other."

"And I have had Starfleet training. They do not send us out into a universe where many humanoid species discriminate against or prey on women without teaching us what to be wary of." She decided not to mention that she actually had _been_ raped once. At the moment she felt extraordinarily defensive and angry, infuriated that Q would be angry with _her_ over this issue. "I realize that for purposes of keeping control of the Ferengi you need to allow them to think you my jealous mate, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't behave as if it were true when we are alone. I am much better experienced than you are at protecting myself."

"I'm _not_ your jealous mate! I just don't want--" He broke off. "Forget it. I'm going to take a shower."

"Q. I can take care of myself."

"Whatever." He stalked off into the bathroom.

The sonic shower came on, at the range she could hear. On top of everything else the irritation was simply too much. She did not quite stomp over to the bathroom to tell him to retune it--stomping would be very undignified for a Vulcan.

Before she could get there, Q stuck his head out of the bathroom. "Hey, I need some help in here."

"Help?"

"Don't worry, I'm perfectly modest. But I need you for something."

"Then you're going to need to retune the sonic shower. I can hear it, and it's quite irritating."

"That's what I need help with. I can't _hear_ it, exactly, but I can feel it and it's grating. You're probably more experienced with adjusting the controls to get rid of ultrasonics than I am."

"Very well." T'Laren was somewhat relieved that he wasn't actively out to irritate her.

As she entered the bathroom and the door slid shut behind her, Q stood between her and the shower. "Sorry about the noise, but we need it. I didn't want to tell you this where the Ferengi can hear, so I figure between the sonics and you not having put full sensors in the bathroom, we can have a few minutes of privacy at least."

This was not what she'd expected at all. She perked up slightly-- Q was obviously actively thinking about their predicament and how to resolve it, which was actually more than she'd expected of him. "All right. I can hear you-- the noise is an irritant, but it's not loud enough to drown you out."

"Yeah, I figured." He closed the cover of the toilet and sat down on it. "Listen, T'Laren. You're only safe when I can see you. If they go for you while I'm _there_ I can pretend to kill myself, but what am I going to do if I'm not there? They might call my bluff, and quite aside from the consequences to you I have no way to protect _either_ of us if they stop believing I can kill myself."

"Given how much financial investment you represent, why would they take the risk simply for a brief pleasure?"

"Because they're playing much more hardball than I thought. I thought things might be bad-- that's why I asked you to sleep in my room last night-- but today--"

"Wait. You asked me to sleep in your room for _my_ protection?"

"Well, honestly, T'Laren, did you really think I thought you could chase off the monster under the bed or something? The things I face in the night, you can't do a damn thing about. And if there was something you could do it'd probably be something I'd like less than the nightmares. I actually couldn't stand having you in there. If I got five minutes of sleep last night I'd be shocked. No, it was for you."

"Why didn't you say so?"

"Right, I'm going to explain in front of the Ferengi listening to the monitors that they could sneak in at night while I'm sleeping and drag you off without me knowing, in case they hadn't figured it out."

When had an alien shapechanger replaced Q? She stared at him, feeling a sudden and totally uncharacteristic desire to hug him. It had been one thing when he'd bluffed the Ferengi in the first place… but he'd deliberately allowed her, and the Ferengi watching them, to think he was afraid and wanted her protection so as not to risk her. It was the first genuinely selfless thing she could think of Q doing the whole time she'd known him. Although, she remembered Anderson telling her that Q had risen to match the best humanity had to offer during the fight with the Borg. Certain types of adversity seemed to draw out a much more positive aspect of his personality.

"Thank you," she said, temporarily stunned. "I… I am still not sure you needed to take such a step, but I am very grateful that you would do such a thing when you thought I was in danger."

"Yeah, well, you're in more danger than I knew last night. And so am I. Yalit told me if I didn't cooperate she'd have me stunned, sedated and put in stasis until I'm sold off. Or in other words she's not afraid of me killing myself anymore. I did my best to convince her that if she sells me off and _then_ I kill myself her customers are going to be just a trifle upset with her, but… I think she's serious. I told her I'd teach her how Lhoviri's transwarp works if she would guarantee your safety. But I just don't _know._ They could drag you off and do whatever they want and then tell me that if I stop working for them they'll do it _again._ Giving them transwarp is a bit more open-ended than killing myself."

"I… didn't know that. I didn't believe I was in danger today-- I still don't. They were rather more interested in voyeuristic amusements than actually touching me."

"Yeah, well, maybe those ones were. What would you have done if they'd brought you to the swimming pool and then half a dozen of their brothers and cousins were waiting there to ambush you? I _know_ you're some kind of kung fu master and all but they have _phasers_, and they're obviously not afraid to use them."

T'Laren took a deep breath. "If they do not use _farr t’gahn_ on me, they may do what they wish to me. I am Vulcan. Rape is not a fate worse than death, and if it would help free us from captivity I would endure. If they do use _farr t’gahn_ I would most likely kill them all."

"I thought you said it would kill you."

"It would. It arouses the _plak tow_, the blood fever. Only a combination of sex and a mind meld would save my life then, and I cannot meld with Ferengi. But before I died I would be consumed with madness-- violence as much as lust. You know… what I am capable of when my emotions are distorted by the _plak tow._"

"Yeah, yeah, you're a badass. How are you going to kill them if they tie you up or something? I mean… I really don't _want_ to be coming up with horrible things they could do to you, or me for that matter, but I _have_ seen just about every evil sentients can commit on each other. And it really wouldn't much make up for your death to know that you took out a whole bunch of them with you."

"And you think this is a serious possibility?"

"I don't know. But I've had quite enough people die on me in even this brief mortal lifetime. I don't need having you added to the list. Besides which, your whole schpiel about being such a stalwart Vulcan and rape means nothing to you and blah blah blah is complete baloney. I may not be an expert on getting people to do what I want but I _am_ an expert on telling when people are upset and frightened, and you are upset and frightened, Vulcan or no. You would _not_ want to put up with being molested, or worse."

She thought of how angry she'd been today just to know the Ferengi were deriving sexual pleasure from _watching_ her. Unfortunately Q had a point. It was easy to forget sometimes that his complete incompetence at making people like him didn't actually arise from any lack of perception of other people's emotional states. "If you consider this a serious threat, I will not allow them to take me to the swimming pool again. However, if I'm disturbing your sleep I probably should not stay in your room at night."

"I am so tired," he said, putting his head in his hands. "As soon as we're done here I'm going to bed and I'm going to pass out." He looked up at her again. "I do think you should sleep in my room, and I don't think it's going to keep me awake. At least not tonight. Whereas wondering if you're still safe might."

"I am not going to sleep that soon. For me it's still early."

"If you're awake you can at least yell for me. I know my skills at verbal defense aren't exactly Starfleet-issue derring-do, but… they won't listen to you. At all. They just don't _care._ At least I have some proven ability at getting them to leave you alone. Just promise me you'll come to my room before you decide to go to sleep or whatever it is you do."

There was a loud banging at the door. "You two, get out of there!"

Q went to the door of the bathroom. "Do you mind? We’ve been trying to fix the damn sonic shower!"

The Ferengi standing there with his phaser scowled at him. "You will ask _us_ for engineering help, you don't try to fix it yourself."

"Oh yes, because you've been so responsive in the past." He pushed his way past the Ferengi. "I've had a long and exhausting day. Is that dinner over there? It better be edible or it's going down your shirt."

"You aren't to be in that room together. Especially not with the sonic shower on."

"Oh, waah. You can't play voyeur. My heart bleeds for you."

"Our orders are to keep an eye on the two of you. You've already tried to escape once."

"I keep telling you, the air circulation cut off."

T'Laren walked over to the dinner trays. She was actually quite hungry after the exertions of the day. The meal that awaited her was a traditional Vulcan dish, hearty and full of legumes and spice. While Q was trading snark with the Ferengi, she sat down to eat.

The Ferengi left, and Q plopped himself down on the couch in front of the dinner tray. "Spaghetti and meatballs. Wonderful. If only I had anything vaguely resembling an appetite."

"Eat as much of it as you can," T'Laren advised. "You need to keep your strength up." She looked at him carefully. He looked _much_ healthier than he had when she first met him, his gauntness almost entirely filled out back to the build he'd had when he was omnipotent. The exercise and diet regimen had been good for him; his skin looked healthier, in better color and without the dull texture of sickness. His posture was better, his eyes were more alive, brighter and more engaged, than they'd been when she'd met him.

"Do I have spaghetti sauce on my chin or something?"

"No, why?"

"You're staring at me."

"I'm merely reflecting how much healthier you look." And how much more attractive. That was totally inappropriate to say, though. Actually it was fairly inappropriate to think as well. She'd been Q's therapist; any sort of romantic relationship with him was thoroughly unethical, even though he had fired her. Why had she allowed her mind to even drift in that direction? "You won't be able to keep it up if you don't eat, though."

"I'm _really_ tired."

"Well, do what you can." She frowned very slightly at her bowl. The spices had masked it at first, but that unpleasant aftertaste was still there. "Q, can I try your dinner?"

"Eat the whole thing. Be my guest." He pushed it over to her.

"I can't eat the whole thing. It has meatballs." She swirled a small amount of spaghetti and sauce onto her fork, avoiding the meatballs, and tasted it. It was fine. There was no bitter taste to it.

Either they were getting their vegetarian menu from a corrupted database, or she was being poisoned.

She thought of the inappropriate and severe anger she'd suffered today, and felt very, very cold. T'Laren pushed the plate away. "Q, will you taste my food for me?"

He sneered. "I didn't situate myself on top of the Terran food chain to eat like a rabbit."

"Just taste it. Please."

With obvious bad grace Q took a bite, and spluttered. "That's _disgusting!_ How can you eat that?" He immediately downed his entire drink in several large gulps.

"Can you describe what's disgusting about it?"

"Oh, where shall I start? Perhaps with the fresh taste of grated _aspirin_ all over the thing? Or perhaps the mouth-numbing spices akin to having a small nuclear explosion go off on your tongue? Or perhaps the awful texture of beans that might as well be giant chunks of _sand_?"

"Grated aspirin. What does grated aspirin taste like?"

"Horrible." Q shuddered. "It's a painkiller so simple and so old that it's not restricted in the replicators, at least not if you're not a suicide risk. I used to take it all the time in my first year on Starbase 56. If you actually bite down on the things or powder them, they're the most disgusting, bitter, horrible--"

"Bitter. My food is bitter."

"Yes! What was your first clue?"

She took a deep breath. "This dish should not be bitter. Neither should my salad from this morning have been, nor should my plomeek soup at lunch. I am being poisoned."

Q's eyes went wide. "No. No, they-- what with? What are they giving you?"

"I don't know. I've had difficulty controlling my emotions today. Vulcans are less able to taste bitter or sweet than humans are; I thought that if I was not simply imagining it or suffering from some sort of illness, you would be able to taste whatever it was more strongly than I could, and it seems that was accurate."

"Is it… that stuff? They threatened to use?"

"I don't know." She stared at her plate of food. "I have felt this way before, and it was not associated with… what we spoke of. It was associated with my… mental difficulties, before that time arrived."

"When you couldn't control your emotions and Starfleet kicked you out?"

"Put me on involuntary medical leave, but yes, essentially. I could not control my emotions properly then. Some of the symptoms I have experienced remind me of that time."

"Well, then, I had better get an explanation and you had better get a cure or someone is not getting any transwarp." He looked up at the ceiling. "Do you hear me? Whatever the _hell_ you're doing to her, you stop it right now, reverse it and fix her, or you get nothing! Do you hear me?"

He turned back to T'Laren. "Eat my spaghetti. Maybe that'll dilute it, if you get some food that doesn't have it."

"You need your food, Q."

"I'll eat the meatballs. I am really not hungry. Especially not now. Do you need water? Maybe if we give you dozens of cups of water we can flush it out of your system."

"Actually, that would only make me very fat. Vulcans retain water. Desert evolved, remember?"

"Hmm, okay, we won't do that. But eat my spaghetti. And drink some water. Your drink might be poisoned but the water probably isn't."

He actually did have a point. She was very hungry, and if she were being poisoned with something that lowered her control of her emotions, she did need to keep her strength up. T'Laren ate Q's spaghetti, pushing the meatballs to the side of the plate, where Q dispiritedly plucked at them with a fork.

The door opened, and a very young Ferengi, hardly more than a boy, came in carrying a second dinner tray and a bowl of grapes. "I'm sorry," he said, looking straight at T'Laren and then ducking his head with an expression of obvious embarrassment. "My mother sent me to apologize to the both of you, and give you assurances. It's not going to happen again."

"What is it?" T'Laren asked, her own voice sounding shockingly hard and angry to her.

"It's dicydrenaline. They were putting it in your food for a joke. I'm really sorry. Here." He put the tray and the bowl down in front of T'Laren. "Here's a replacement for your dinner, and a dessert for an apology. The dose wasn't very high. I can get a hypo with an antidote if you want."

"No." She relaxed very slightly. "If it's dicydrenaline, and they cease to put it in the food, I will recover quickly enough." She took a bite of the replacement dinner. "Much better."

"Let me taste that. So I can identify that crap they were putting in your food. What's it do?"

"It makes Vulcans drunk, effectively. It lowers inhibitions, decreases emotional control. Here."

Q took a bite. "Okay. This is still absolutely awful, but there's at least no grated aspirin in it. Did you bring anything else for us to drink, rodent boy?"

"I can get you something from the replicator," the boy said eagerly, ignoring Q's insult. "What do you want?"

"Tipharean bubble juice. Or root beer, whichever."

"I would like very cold water, please," T'Laren said.

The Ferengi went to the replicator, placed their orders, and got their drinks. No password control. It was obviously all being done at the level of voice recognition. Interesting. Q gulped half his drink again, while T'Laren sipped hers. Dicydrenaline. There were so many worse possibilities it could have been, and it was so obvious. The Ferengi had probably thought to lower her inhibitions, destroy her emotional control, and then either rape her or blackmail her into sex, when she would not have had the discipline to keep them from seeing her reactions. Q was right. She thought of the giggling, leering men stroking their earlobes as she swam. Sooner or later the terrible word picture Q had painted _would_ have come true-- they'd have taken her swimming until her guard was down, or let her exhaust herself swimming first, one day… She shook her head slightly. It wouldn't happen now. She had taken the drug before by hypo-- it really wasn't much like alcohol for humans in that Vulcans had never drunk it for recreational purposes. Before the time of Surak, some had smoked the plant it was found in, but she had read that it was too bitter to eat, and now she knew why.

When her food was done, she put a grape in her mouth, and almost gasped. It was incredibly sweet, far more than she expected from a grape, but with a sharp bite to it cutting the sweetness down just to the level where it was pleasant instead of cloying. "These are modified," she said to the Ferengi boy.

He beamed. "You like them? They're replicator modified for Vulcan palates."

"They are delicious," she admitted.

"Gimme one of those," Q said. He popped the grape into his mouth, and almost choked. "T'Laren, these are _fermented!_"

"Interesting." She took another grape and worked on analyzing the taste. Q was right. The sugar levels of the grapes was much higher than normal grapes, and the tang was alcohol, cutting the taste. Vulcans weren't terribly susceptible to alcohol; in great quantities it could affect them as it did humans, but there wasn't enough in these grapes to affect her. There was enough to affect Q, though, particularly since he was more used to synthehol than the real stuff. "You're right."

"What, trying to get her drunk _again_ is your way of apologizing?" Q snarled at the Ferengi.

"It's all right, Q. It doesn't affect me as it does humans-- it just changes the taste slightly. These have a much higher sugar content than ordinary grapes; without the alcohol to cut the taste they'd be too sweet to bear, but as it is they are in fact quite good."

"I'll take your word for it. I don't really need to get drunk. Although if you save a few I probably could use them the next time I have to spend a day spoonfeeding idiots."

She nodded at the Ferengi boy. "Thank you. This was a very pleasant gesture."

He grinned, embarrassed, and then ran off, out of their cell.

"You do realize, there was nothing altruistic about that apology? Yalit obviously didn't want to risk me quitting my job."

"Of course. But there is no reason why I needed to be rude to the boy. _He_ seemed sincere. Perhaps they don't develop the misogyny until they're older and farther from the influence of their mothers." She looked at Q. "I wish to apologize. You were most likely right about their intentions regarding the swimming; they'd have waited until the dicydrenaline had taken full effect in another day or two, but eventually that was most likely their intent."

"I am distressingly often right about horrible things people like to do to each other," Q said tiredly. He stood up. "I'm going to bed. I can barely see straight, and I haven't had _nearly_ enough coffee to stay awake after the day I've had."

"That is the best plan, most likely. Get some sleep. I'll be in when I need to rest." Actually she could go into her meditations now if she wanted, but after Q had admitted to her that he hadn't slept at all last night, she would leave him some time to fall asleep before going in.

She found one of his books-- he had a number of real books, generally antique classics-- and sat down to try to read it, but she couldn't concentrate. Perhaps after being poisoned with dicydrenaline for a day it hadn't been wise to eat so many fermented grapes. Alcohol didn't normally have any sort of profound effect on her, but she felt unusually unfocused. Her mental restlessness was matched by some slight amount of physical restlessness, counterpointed by the weariness she felt from her exertions today. Perhaps more exercise _would_ help.

T'Laren returned to the katas, this time without the anger that had driven her earlier today. This time she was aiming for focus, not catharsis. Martial arts was a form of achieving discipline and focus while dispelling physical energy that couldn't be released by ordinary meditation. She tried to put herself into them fully, to let her mind narrow down to nothing more than the sensation of movement and the effort to perform precisely the correct movements. After some time she recognized it wasn't really working. She still couldn't focus, and now she was tired.

She sat on the couch, intending to meditate. Her mind drifted. Q had surprised her greatly today. She wished she could take credit for it, but from what Anderson had said about the Borg, and for that matter from what Picard had said when she was on the _Enterprise_ collecting information about Q from everyone who knew him in preparation for taking the assignment, she knew she hadn't taught Q selflessness. He'd been capable of it from his first day of being human-- perhaps from when he'd been omnipotent, though she suspected such a powerful being would rarely if ever be called on to sacrifice anything of any real importance to him. Depression made all beings much more selfish and inwardly focused, and usually made them behave badly in social situations; all she'd done was help him overcome that, letting qualities he'd obviously always had come to the forefront. It was as if she was seeing him for the first time.

She'd been obsessed with helping him because that was what Lhoviri had demanded of her in order to undo her crime. This was the first time she felt strongly that he was someone who had _deserved_ what she had done for him, in any greater sense than the general belief she held as a mental health professional that no one should have to suffer from depression. She had tried to keep him from throwing her out of his life because… well, she hadn't been entirely sure why not, except that she had no real reason for existing if she couldn't continue to try to help him. Now she felt as if he was becoming someone-- or had always been someone, and was just able to show it now-- that she _wanted_ to be friends with.

Her eyes followed the patternless expanse of the ceiling, drifted over the walls. She was so tired. She'd made Q a promise, but surely she could sit for a few moments before going to his room. Let him have a bit longer to get to sleep. He needed it, and deserved it after what he'd done since they'd been captured. She didn't have to get up just yet.

T'Laren heard them before she saw them. The door opened, and she wanted to turn around, but her body was strangely heavy, almost paralyzed. She heard giggling male voices. The Ferengi who'd taken her to swim. She needed to stand up, to tell them to leave the room. It was as if she was in a gravity field of several gee. Everything was too heavy and she couldn't even really see right. Some sort of strange tunnel vision. They came to the couch where she sat, snickering, grasping their lobes and grinning. She tried to open her mouth to call Q, but no voice came out. The first of the leering Ferengi pulled her off the couch and pushed her down flat on the floor. The rug was thick, and she was sinking into it. She was wearing the swimsuit from before, and her limbs were so heavy because she was too tired from swimming, and she couldn't move. One of them was touching her legs, pulling them apart, and the first one was kneeling on her stomach. He undid the straphooks on the swimsuit and pulled it down, exposing her breasts, grasping them and fondling them as the DaiMon had done when they were first taken captive, and she couldn't move.

Rage overwhelmed her and broke the paralysis. She lunged forward and grabbed the Ferengi's head, twisting violently. He screamed, and then went silent with a loud cracking sound, and his body went limp. He was dead, and the pleasure that filled her at killing him was almost like sex. All control gone, she came to her feet, knife in her hand, longing to bury it hard in one of her tormentors, cut him open and watch him scream and bleed his life away…

* * *

With a gasp of horror, T'Laren opened her eyes.

There were no Ferengi in the room. She had fallen asleep without being able to properly meditate, and she had dreamed. Had dreamed. Even as her conscious mind reeled in self-disgust she remembered the sheer animal ecstasy of the murder she'd committed in the dream, the bloodlust that had consumed her.

Obviously the dicydrenaline hadn't fully worn off. That, and she always had awful nightmares when she dreamed without meditating first. She was breathing hard, skin cold. Not quite shaking. She wouldn't lose that much control.

She went into Q's room. She _had_ meant to keep her promise to him. And perhaps the rape scenario in the dream had been her brain warning her of her vulnerability, trying to wake her up. She wasn't sure that his plan to have her sleep in his room would actually be needed, or effective for that matter, but she'd made a promise, and as long as he was actually asleep, it couldn't hurt.

Q still slept with a dim nightlight. He'd curled up tightly in the blankets. As usual, he looked much more vulnerable, fragile and frightened, in his sleep-- though at least he didn't look as if he were just a few meters from death's door anymore. She sat down on the bed, breathing deeply, looking at him. It was ridiculous. They could still come in here with stunners if they wanted to take her, and with the groveling apology they'd delivered it was apparently unlikely Yalit would allow them to touch her as long as Q cooperated with her. She didn't _actually_ need to be in Q's room to be safe. And yet she did feel safer. Illogical, but there it was. The room smelled of human, but to her that was childhood and safety and love with her foster parents. That was probably why she was having this visceral reaction. Possibly any human would have done.

He looked so vulnerable, so… she didn't know what, exactly. She felt enormously protective of him, and tender. An urge almost overwhelmed her to reach out and stroke him, to push sweat-matted hair away from his forehead and pet him. She controlled it. It was totally inappropriate and it wouldn't have the reassuring effect she'd have intended; Q had been nearly killed in his sleep too many times to respond well to being touched while he was sleeping.

He was so beautiful.

She shook her head at the words her thoughts chose. He was healthy, and that made him more attractive. Beauty was not an adjective she should be applying.

But it was true. He was beautiful. Despite being terrified, desperate, totally untrained for this kind of situation, and in fairly severe danger himself, he had spent the last two days trying to protect her. And he hadn't even told her. He'd whined about what a horrible day he'd had, but he hadn't mentioned or sought sympathy for Yalit's threat to have him put in stasis if he didn't cooperate until he obviously felt he _had_ to tell T'Laren to keep her out of danger. He'd let her think he was frightened for himself because that was what he'd thought he'd needed to do to keep her safe.

Tears pricked at her eyes. Vulcans were really, really bad at handling emotional overloads when their usual mechanisms of control weren't working properly. She got off the bed before she did something to completely humiliate herself and Q, such as breaking down crying because he was being so brave, or waking him up with her thoroughly unethical desire to touch him. Earlier she'd used the sonic shower to clean her bedsheets; they were still lying neatly folded on Q's dresser. She took them and laid them down on the floor. It was cold. Lately it was always cold, but it seemed that it was actually getting worse.

Sleep didn't come as easily as it should have. She was too tired, too unfocused to meditate, which was deeply unfortunate as she really needed to. That frightened her, after the nightmare she'd had. T'Laren lay on the floor, breathing deeply, drawing in the scent of the bedroom. The Ferengi had never even been in here. She couldn't smell them anymore. No one had really assaulted her. She hadn't really killed anyone. Only a dream.

Safety in numbers. Q would help defend her if they did attack, and Yalit apparently was putting a high priority on this transwarp thing. It was as safe as it could be, given their captivity.

Eventually she fell asleep.

* * *

Morning came at last but didn't leave her well-rested. Paradoxically, her body felt charged with restless energy, too much of it to sleep well, but her mind felt fogged and sleep-deprived. A combination of nightmares and the restlessness had kept her waking up frequently all night. When she could no longer stand lying on the cold floor trying to sleep, she tried to meditate, and failed as utterly as she had failed the night before. Q was still asleep, but she wasn’t willing to stay in here and be silent, trying to avoid waking him, for any longer – if the Ferengi did attempt to come for her, as Q had feared, let them. She was, at least physically, wide awake, and the violence of a fight would do a lot to wake her up.

That was an incredibly stupid thing to think. She had to blink at her own idiocy. She _wanted_ a fight? Evidently the dicydrenaline was taking quite some time to wear off. She hadn’t felt this way – sluggish, stupid, and violent – since her mental breakdown. Vulcans weren’t supposed to feel this way, ever.

As best as anyone had ever been able to determine, the proximate cause of her mental breakdown had been the telepathic rape she’d inflicted on Melor to save her life. He had figured out that she was a spy, despite her having slept with him for weeks in order to prevent exactly that, and had captured her and bound her, planning to turn her in or kill her. She had seduced him, playing on Romulan male fantasies of “converting” Vulcan women to the way of emotions and Romulan beliefs, and it had worked – he’d thought himself to be her lover; he’d never known she’d only slept with him to keep him from looking at her cover too closely. He’d been willing to believe that she had fallen in love with him. He’d left her bound – he wasn’t _that_ stupid. But he didn’t understand Vulcan telepathy. Without her hands to touch the contact points it’d been harder to make a telepathic connection, but with all of his naked skin laid against all of hers, she didn’t _need_ the contact points. She’d invaded his mind during sex, paralyzed him, and ripped out all of his memories of her true identity, replacing them with false memories of bondage bedroom games. Of course, after he was done with sex he’d untied her, because by then she’d made him believe he’d tied her up for fun, not because she was a threat. And then she’d run, and returned to Federation space as soon as she could.

She’d done it to save her life, not for some prurient pleasure. But the fact had remained, she’d touched the mind of a man she’d been having sex with at the time, and it had fulfilled her as nothing but Soram’s _pon farr_ ever had. And she had hated herself for that. As a Starfleet officer, and later as an intelligence agent, she’d been prepared to kill or be killed. She’d been prepared to pretend to emotions she didn’t feel, to use her body to accomplish her purposes, because a body was only a body and only telepathic intimacy could break her marriage vows. She had never expected to start actually feeling anything – she was a Vulcan. And she hadn’t expected to feel pleasure in committing an act that not only broke her marriage vows but was itself one of the most horrible crimes a Vulcan could commit. The moral dilemma, the guilt, and the memory of pleasures she never experienced in her real life, had all conspired to shatter her control, and she had seriously considered leaving her Vulcan identity behind entirely. Soram had talked her back from that… and she had repaid him by killing him.

Lhoviri had sent her to the past, to study with Surak. The father of Vulcan philosophy had taught his techniques to people who’d never grown up with them, who had expected to fail at them as often as they succeeded. Surak’s gentle lack of judgementalism, his acceptance of any horror his students might have committed in their pasts as long as they were dedicated to forsaking those sins and overcoming the emotionalism that had led them to commit such acts, had done far more good for her mental state than any modern Vulcan teacher, coming from the perspective that all Vulcans should be easily capable of such discipline, could give her. And for a long time she’d thought herself fully cured. But had she been? Dicydrenaline shouldn’t evoke such powerfully violent feelings in her. It lowered Vulcan inhibitions and reduced the ability to control the emotions, but by itself it usually produced feelings of giddiness, excitement, an openness to pleasure and humor – at least in the literature she’d read. Vulcans who became extremely violent under its influence were mostly found to be suppressing an unusual amount of rage and violent desire in their everyday lives. And yes, she was a prisoner with an uncertain future, being sexually harassed by her captors, but did that really explain the violent feelings she was having? She hadn’t felt this way when she’d been taken captive before, in her work as a Starfleet officer, even in worse conditions than this. She hadn’t felt this way when she’d been raped.

Of course, she hadn’t felt this way for _most_ of the time that she’d been losing her control completely, either. She’d been just as likely to act out sexually, to giggle inappropriately, or to suffer sudden crying fits as she’d been to feel rage. The level of desire for violence she felt was something she associated with the moment she’d killed Soram – though she wasn’t that far gone yet.

Was this dicydrenaline, or was this her old mental illness reasserting itself? Was this a delayed reaction to tr’Sahlassiu’s mental invasion, or simply the stress of her captivity breaking down barriers she’d never built back up as well as she thought she had?

She exercised until breakfast arrived, trying to drive out the unwanted feelings of rage and overwhelming restlessness with physical activity, or at least tire herself enough that she could sleep. It didn’t work. She wasn’t hungry, either, despite the exercise, but at least when breakfast arrived, she figured she could wake Q up, and have someone to talk to in order to take her mind off its obsession with its own flaws. But that didn’t last; Q drank his coffee, ate his omelet and bacon, complained about stupid things like the lack of cheese in the omelet, got dressed, and left to go help their captors develop transwarp, without giving T’Laren much opportunity to talk to him. She knew that wasn’t his fault, that he had to do as Yalit was demanding, but she felt inappropriately angry about that as well, both at the Ferengi for taking him away and, absurdly, at him for going along with it.

She picked morosely at her own food. Although it seemed a perfectly palatable meal – toast with _chalan_ paste and peanut butter – she had no appetite. In an effort to push back the tide of useless anger, since meditation wasn’t working and the value of exercise seemed limited, she ate several of the grapes from last night. Vulcans didn’t use sweets to improve their mood – generally Vulcans didn’t acknowledge that they had moods that needed improving – but humans did, and T’Laren had used the technique as a child when the disciplines her teacher had tried to train her in failed, or when she needed not to control her emotions but to pretend to positive ones. Hopefully, at least the sugar would waken her appetite.

But the effect, unfortunately, was not what she had hoped. The fog of exhaustion lifted somewhat, but if anything she became more irritable, and the food less appetizing. Q had done a lousy job cleaning up the dead bugs, and there were still clothes on the floor, furniture in disarray, and although yesterday she’d thought she’d been thorough enough cleaning the smell of human urine out of the carpet, today she smelled it as strongly as she had yesterday. She started cleaning ferociously, attacking the dead bugs and the disarray as if the symptoms of her captivity were themselves the disease, and freeing herself of mess and smell would free her from the Ferengi.

It was hours before she thought the main room was clean enough to suit her. As she marched into the bedroom, planning simply to straighten it up a bit, the smell hit her again – the scent of male human. Q was as clean as he could reasonably keep himself under such circumstances – it wasn’t the acid stench of ill, frightened or unhygienic human, merely the pure scent of a male human body. She gathered the sheets of the bed and breathed deeply, drinking in the small. A pulse of arousal shot through her, radiating upwards from her groin throughout her body.

Startled, T’Laren almost dropped the blankets. What was she doing? Where had _that_ come from? She remembered the powerful sexual urges that used to overwhelm her, when she’d been ill, and shook her head very slightly in negation. If she _was_ having another breakdown, that was the last thing she could afford to let herself feel. Q was the only available outlet for such desires – she would rather rip the Ferengi limb from limb than have sex with them – and it was one thing to indulge a need for casual sex with the average xenophilic human male space traveler she’d meet in bars on alien worlds. Quite another to make overtures to a virgin with serious hang-ups on the subject, who trusted you as his only real friend.

She was going to have to wash the sheets after all. She couldn’t be reacting this way. Not when this drug was taking so long to leave her system. And that made no sense, either – she wasn’t a psychiatrist or a doctor, but as a psychologist she had certainly studied the effects of mood-altering drugs on all the major Federation species, including her own. Dicydrenaline was supposed to be purged from a Vulcan’s bloodstream within a few hours of the last dose. Had they put a time-released version in her food? It would have to have a very extended period – except for the grapes, she hadn’t eaten in 12 hours.

T’Laren brought the sheets into the bathroom to wash them. The cleaning solvent she’d been given didn’t handle the sheer volume of fabric very well – Q liked very plush blankets. It took forever, iteration after iteration of spraying with solvent and then turning the heavy blankets this way and that in the sonics. She thought of generations of women before her, using whatever technologies they had at the time to wash out the blankets their mates and children slept in. And then to her horror she found tears welling in her eyes and her chest growing tight. She had no children. With a history of mental illness she probably never would. She would never belong to that ancient sorority of motherhood, never be anchored to the future, and she was an orphan, cast adrift from the past. Soram had been supposed to bind her to Vulcan, connect her to the shared web of history and family. Instead he’d cast her aside. She was alone.

Furiously T’Laren flung the mass of blankets to the bathroom floor. This was unacceptable! She couldn’t be getting emotional, to the point of _weeping_, over stupid issues like her lack of family. She was a prisoner and the man in her charge was depending on her to find a way to free them both. She had bigger things to worry about than if she would ever have children. This was stupid, none of this made any sense even given that they’d drugged her, and she would _not_ lose control like this!

She stomped out to the other room to exercise again, but simple katas weren’t enough. She needed impact, she needed violence. Methodically, albeit swiftly, she beat the wall within an inch of its nonexistent life, pretending it was a Ferengi and kicking and punching it as if it were alive.

Finally she was tired enough to feel some peace. She looked at the wall, which was dented and painted green in spots, and then at her knuckles, disinterestedly, like a doctor assessing a patient’s injuries rather than a woman looking at what she’d done to her own hand. The knuckles were skinned and bruised, green smeared all over the back of her hand, but no serious injury. She felt languid, relaxed. The hand hurt but the pain was far away, more like pain felt through a mental link or pain distanced by the disciplines. At last, she thought, she would be able to meditate. Or sleep. Either would help.

She went back to the bedroom, sat on the now-bare mattress with legs crossed under her, and closed her eyes.

* * *

It had been bad enough having to teach fundamental principles of physics to typical run-of-the-mill mortal idiots. Teaching brain-dead Ferengi engineers how to make a Thetaran transwarp drive work on dilithium crystals was nothing short of awful. It would have been unbearable if he hadn’t been lying through his teeth. It was actually much harder to devise consistent, plausible lies that worked in preliminary testing, and wouldn’t make the ship blow up, than it would have been to tell the truth, but lying was simply much more satisfying. Every violation of the fundamental laws of reality that he could pass off on Yalit and her brood with a straight face was another shovel of dirt out of the tiger pit he was digging for them, and he found it grimly amusing that they had no idea what lurked under their feet.

Overall, he was miserable but hopeful. The groveling apology the Ferengi had delivered last night meant that the harassment would probably stop, or at least ease up. They’d provided edible food for breakfast and the amenities he needed to not feel positively bestial. And if they followed his instructions, the power crystals would blow spectacularly. He knew where he had stashed the extra crystals he had requisitioned from _Yamato_ the night before they left; he doubted very strongly that the Ferengi would be able to find them. As soon as the power went out, he and T’Laren could… well, do something; fighting their way through the number of Ferengi on this ship seemed implausible, but Q also knew where the emergency distress beacons were and could probably amplify one to call back to _Yamato._

The Ferengi engineers didn’t take lunch breaks; they kept bowls of grubworms around and snacked on them incessantly, rather like Q had seen human engineers do with coffee. Until he’d met T’Laren Q had never eaten lunch, and he felt entirely too stressed, not to mention nauseated by the Ferengi eating grubworms, to feel any real hunger now, but he did demand refills of his coffee every time the cup ran low. By 1400 hours he was completely wired, almost hyperactive. Yalit had disappeared a while ago. This was both positive and negative -- he hated having to deal with the grotesque little troll, but she _was_ smarter than her sprogs had turned out, and easier to talk to on the level of pure physics.

Then she called him in to her office. _Finally woke up from your nap, old woman?_ He strolled in insouciantly, pretending not the slightest concern as to what she might want him for. "You rang?"

Yalit nodded. "Gon. Sed. Hold him down."

_What--?_ Almost before he could register what she'd said, the two Ferengi who'd escorted him in had grabbed his arms and shoulders. They shoved him down on the desk. Q resisted, throwing all his weight backwards, trying to pull free or at least keep them from pushing him down, but they were strong enough to force him into place. "What are you _doing?_ Let me go!"

"You've been a bad, bad boy," Yalit said, her voice cold and mocking. She walked up to him and ran her hand through his hair. "You really thought you could get away with it, didn't you?"

"What are you talking about? Let me _go!_ Are you trying to dislocate my shoulders or something?"

Her hand tightened, yanking his hair and pulling his head up to look at her. He screamed with the pain. "You've been lying to me. What was supposed to happen? Was the ship going to blow up and kill us all?"

"I don't know what you're talking about! And let go of the hair, I really don't need to go bald this week."

"Don't _lie_ to me, little man," Yalit snarled. "You made a deal. You said you'd show me how to build and sell this transwarp drive. And you lied. You've tried to sabotage my work, make a fool of me, and I would be within my rights to put you in stasis right now, sell you to the Ceuli with instructions to take you out as soon as they're ready to kill you, and let my sons fuck your girlfriend as much as they want." Suddenly terrified, Q struggled harder, kicking and trying to push against the desk. Yalit _knew._ How had she known? This wasn't happening, it couldn't be. "But as you pointed out before, that doesn't get me transwarp. On the other hand, trusting you to do as you said doesn't seem to be getting me transwarp either. So... perhaps a small inducement to make you take me seriously. Some _discipline_, for your outrageous behavior."

"I'm not lying," Q said desperately. "It's not my fault if you're too stupid to--"

She slapped his face, hard. Q cried out. "Shut up. You lied, and you are going to be punished for it."

The two Ferengi holding him down clamped magnetic shackles on his wrists, holding his arms pinned low to either side of the desk. Someone behind him pushed something against the back of his knees, some sort of magnetic bar, perhaps, that held his legs immobilized against the desk. Q whimpered and tried futilely to pull free of the clamps. Sharp fingernails were touching him above the waist, scraping against his skin as they pulled his shirt up to his shoulders. "No-- no, please--"

Yalit grabbed him by the hair against and pulled his head close to her mouth, whispering in his ear. Her breath might have made him retch if he hadn't been so frightened. "Do you know how I got offworld, to attend the Makropyrios? Do you know how, as a woman, I can attend offworld conferences? How I kept control of my own sons, why their fathers didn't take them? Do you have _any_ idea what you're dealing with?"

"Please -- let go --"

"You see, a Ferengi man isn’t a man at all if he doesn't push his women around. If he hasn't got the lobes to control a woman in bed, who's going to trust that he's got the lobes for business? And that's a problem. Some men, you know, get tired of telling other people what to do all day. Some men want a spanking when they're bad, and then they want Mommy to kiss it better and tell them they're a good boy. And if their peers on Ferenginar were to find out they like that sort of thing, well..."

_Oh, I see. Not just a whore, but a blackmailer. What a fine exemplar of moral rectitude you are, Yalit!_ He didn't say it. He was too frightened to say anything. Yalit continued. "So you see, you were wrong. I didn't sell my body. No more than any Ferengi woman, anyway. We all sell our bodies. What I sold was _pain."_ She pinched and twisted his earlobe. "I made my early living punishing men. Of course, _they_ liked it. Do you think you will?"

"No-- no, please-- I'm sorry, please--"

"You’re just sorry you got caught at it," she snapped, and brandished something at him. "You know what this is, Mr. Knows Everything?"

For a moment he didn't, and then he recognized it. It was a whip. A Ferengi neurowhip, turned off at the moment. His heart almost stopped. "Oh no, no please, you don't have to do this, I'm sorry, I won't do it again--"

"You're right. You won't."

"The Continuum wouldn't let me give any mortals information like that!" He tried to follow her with his eyes and head, since he couldn't really move his body at all. "I was afraid they'd destroy me if I really gave you transwarp. It could destabilize the whole quadrant. Please, I'm sorry!"

"Don't bargain with latinum you don't have. If you weren't allowed to give me the information, then you shouldn’t have agreed to do it."

He saw her hand raise, saw the neurowhip come to terrifying life, humming and crackling with light. "NO!"

The blow knocked the wind from him. For a split second he was suspended, as if trapped between moments of time, waiting for the pain. The welt flared awake across his back then, a single burning line. And then it radiated from there across his entire back, like the acid solution had been on his throat, like she'd set him on fire. He screamed, and couldn't stop.

"One for disobeying me and breaking our deal. And one for lying to me."

"No no no _please_\--"

When the second lash struck, he started retching. With his body pinned to the desk, he couldn't keep his head up and out of it; he threw up onto the table everything in his guts, which fortunately mostly consisted of coffee but was still vile, and then fell into it, his cheek laying in his own vomit. He began to sob.

"There, now." She patted his head. He registered that as an additional dull humiliation, not that it mattered when she'd broken him so far already. "You'll be a good boy now, won't you? No more lies, no more deal-breaking. You'll help me develop a _working_ transwarp drive, and there won't be any more of this."

Q nodded frantically. "Yes, yes, I promise," he choked out between sobs. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I promise..."

"You know, you got yourself into this whole situation because you underestimated me. Mocking me, insulting my intellect, trying to destroy my reputation... you thought I was enough of an idiot that you could lie and I wouldn't catch it. Isn't that right?"

"I'm sorry, please, I'm sorry..."

"Oh, you're sorry. But you're not sorry that you dismiss people, decide they're too stupid to talk to you, despise them and try to destroy them professionally. I think you need to be. I think you need just a little more discipline."

He realized that "discipline" was a euphemism for the torture she'd inflicted on him, and started to panic. "Oh no no please I'm sorry I won't do it again I promise you don’t NO NO--"

This time the lash struck through his clothes, against his buttocks, but the pain was so awful he might as well have been naked for it. For moments the world went gray, and tunneled, and he thought he was about to faint, but even that tiny mercy was denied him -- the pain followed him as the world started to dim, and then reality came back and the pain was still there, perhaps even stronger. He couldn't hear anything but the blood rushing in his ears and his own screams. The clamps went away, and he fell into a pile on the floor, sliding off the desk, unable to make his muscles work to support him at all. Wet cloth was pressing against the skin of his legs. With distant horror Q realized he'd lost control of his bladder on the third lash. It was impossible to sink lower than this. He cried hysterically, repeating over and over "Forgive me... forgive me..." Yalit said something snide about his begging her for forgiveness, but it wasn't her he was talking to anymore. It was the Continuum.

_I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I can't go up against this much pain. I know you don't understand. I didn't understand pain when I was one of you, either. But I'd rather die than let her do this to me again. I know that if I give her what she asks for, it'll destabilize the quadrant and violate our laws, and you'll probably condemn me for it. But if I don't, she'll do this again and I can't, I can't bear it, I can't, please, please forgive me. I'm only human. You made me that way. Please, please, understand, I can't resist her now. Give me a way to escape this, or kill me, or something, but please, I wanted to do the right thing but I can't, please understand..._

A kick in the ribs got his attention. "All right, that's enough," she said. "Get up and get back to work."

After this? With his entire back still on fire, she expected him to be able to work? "I can't..."

"You want the whip again?"

"NO! No, please!"

"Then get up."

He tried. He tried desperately, terrified of what she would do if he failed. But his back muscles simply wouldn't work. He couldn't get up off the floor. He tried using his arms to pull himself to his feet using the desk but his hands wouldn't hold his weight, he was shaking and he couldn't clamp them tightly enough. Q moaned in terror, knowing what Yalit had threatened, but no matter how hard he tried he simply couldn't get up.

Yalit laughed, and gestured at the two men still behind him. They reached down, each grabbed an arm, and hauled Q to his feet. Once he was there he was extremely wobbly, but able to support himself by leaning on the desk. He managed, barely, to stop crying.

"Time to get back to work," she said. "And this time no lies."

His face and chest were covered with vomit, his pants wet. "Can I get changed?" he asked, but it came out as a hoarse whisper. "Please?"

"No. You can stay like that all day -- it'll remind you of the consequences of disobeying me. Now." She lifted a PADD. "You're going to explain these equations again and you're going to fix them."

He couldn't concentrate. There was no way he could explain advanced physics right now in terms mortals could understand. He hurt far too much. But if he didn't, she would whip him again.

Grimly, Q took a deep breath -- through his mouth, trying hard not to smell himself -- and mustered up the tattered remains of his dignity. He had to do this. There was no choice.

"To begin with, the coefficient of _j_ isn't 2.71 times ten to the sixteenth, it's 3.98 times ten to the fifteenth..."

* * *

The door swished open at around the same time Q had returned yesterday. T'Laren looked up from the couch, and was on her feet immediately. Something was very wrong. Q's eyes were puffy and red, his shirt was stained, he was moving very stiffly, and he smelled awful. "Q! What's wrong?"

"None of your business," Q snapped. His voice was hoarse. "I want a shower."

He stalked into the bathroom. The door swooshed shut behind him and clicked as it locked. T’Laren followed him to the door. “Are you all right?”

“Fine! Peachy! Never better!” She could hear an awful strain in his voice.

“Q, stop being difficult and tell me what’s wrong!”

“Nothing’s wrong! I’m fiiiingaah!” The last was a strangled cry of pain, cutting off his words and proving, if she had actually needed proof, that he was in fact hurt.

“I can _tell_ you’re hurt, Q.”

“Very good, Sherlock! Take you all that Vulcan logic to figure that out?” Another strangled moan.

“Let me help you! I might be able to do something for you. I do have some medical training.”

He laughed unpleasantly. “A backrub isn’t going to do much for this, T’Laren. Now go away. I need a shower.”

“All right, but tell me if there’s anything I can do.”

The sound of the shower came on before she was even done with her sentence, and she heard him scream. It was a choked-off scream – he was still trying to hide how much he obviously hurt – but a scream nonetheless. He wouldn’t let her help, and there was nothing she could do until he unlocked the door, but at least she could listen. As the shower noise got louder, Q’s whimpers grew more and more frequent, until finally he broke down and started openly crying. The sound haunted T’Laren. She wanted desperately to go to him, to do something to ease his pain, though off the top of her head she didn’t know what yet. She couldn’t walk back to the couch and sit down – she felt compelled to stand near the door, as close to him as she could come.

Eventually the shower stopped. “Get me a pair of boxers,” Q demanded through the door, no longer crying but his voice still full of that terrible strain.

“You have boxers?”

“One or two pairs. Probably buried at the bottom of the underpants drawer. Or else in my luggage still. Although if I bothered to unpack the leopardskin loincloth I probably unpacked the boxers too.”

It turned out that most of Q’s underwear consisted of briefs, made of a thick, soft and breathable but unyielding material with hardly any give. T’Laren had never previously had any occasion to handle his underwear, so she hadn’t observed this before, and she wasn’t a man, so she had no personal knowledge in the matter, but she couldn’t imagine that they could possibly be comfortable when wrapped around an organ that could randomly change size. Knowing Q as she did, she suspected the briefs were designed to hide any suggestion of a human weakness like an erection. The boxers, which turned out to be in the bottom of the drawer as he’d said, were opaque in color but so light and silky they seemed hardly solid. She wondered what had inspired him to acquire them. They seemed to indicate that at some point he’d had to have been more open to human sensuality, if not outright sexuality, than he was now.

She brought one over to the door. “When did you get these?” she asked.

The door opened, and Q, dressed in his bathrobe, grabbed the boxers out of her hand, then stepped back into the bathroom and let the door swoosh shut again. “If you’ve just been stabbed in the gut, it turns out briefs aren’t comfortable in the slightest,” he said through the door. For a horrified moment she thought that he meant he’d just been stabbed, and then she realized he was probably referring to the incident with the Maierlen assassin, and that he was answering her question. That was a pity, if it was the truth. It would be so much more pleasant if he had gotten them to enjoy wearing them rather than to minimize pain from an injury.

Q left the bathroom again, still walking very stiffly. The bathrobe was the color of royal robes in European human tradition, and it was plush velour and very long, so with his stiff small steps and the robe trailing on the floor he looked like a displeased emperor.

“Can you tell me what’s wrong now? I want to help you.”

“Can you break my neck for me? Because that’s about the only help I can imagine anyone but a Federation doctor doing for me right now, and maybe not even one of them.” Rather than going to the couch he headed directly for the bedroom. “Li would probably say I’m overreacting. Of course I could have my leg cut off with a blunt chainsaw in front of Li and he’d probably say I was overreacting.”

“Are you tired enough to go to bed without dinner?”

“I have no interest in dinner, but I’m not going to bed. I just can’t sit down, and I’m not going to stand up all day.”

“What happened?”

They went into the bedroom. Very gingerly, Q climbed on the bed and laid down on his stomach. “As entertaining as it might be to completely destabilize the politics of the Alpha Quadrant with a piece of technology that shouldn’t even be here, I decided the Q Continuum might look at me askance if I actually gave Yalit transwarp. Unfortunately she was smarter than I gave her credit for.”

He hadn’t been injured in an accident. Yalit had done this to him, whatever it was. T’Laren was possessed of a sudden desire to run Yalit through with a carving knife, lift it into the air and drive it into the wall, letting the small Ferengi hang from it as she bled to death. _Control._ There was no point to letting rage run away with her, even if she was having a hard time actually controlling her emotions right now. “What did she do to you?”

“Hit me with a neurowhip. Three times.” He was obviously trying to sound casual about it, but it wasn’t working. A slight crack in his voice at the end gave him away. Not that he didn’t have reason.

“When?”

He turned his head toward her. “_When?_ What difference does that make?”

“A neurowhip is extremely painful but it’s only supposed to last a few minutes. It’s a slaver’s weapon. If you’re still hurt…”

“It was early afternoon. Are you sure they’re only supposed to last a few minutes? That was something like four or five hours ago.”

“Let me see.”

“You are aware I’m not wearing anything but this bathrobe and the boxers you got me.”

“If I had a prurient interest in your body this would hardly be an appropriate time to express it in any case. May I see?”

He got to his knees, very slowly, and carefully shrugged the bathrobe off his left arm and shoulder, then laid back down again with it lying mostly on his back. “Be my guest,” he said through gritted teeth.

T’Laren sat on the bed and reached to the bathrobe, intending to lift it up enough that she could see his injuries. As her fingers brushed Q’s back lightly while starting to lift the bathrobe, he screamed, his whole body stiffening. Startled, she dropped the bathrobe.

“Be _careful!_ You have to grab that thing right where she hit me?”

“I didn’t,” T’Laren said, staring at his back. When she’d dropped the bathrobe it had exposed just enough of that spot on his back that she could clearly see the skin smooth, unbroken and unreddened. “Let me try this again.”

Using great caution, she pulled the bathrobe up without letting it or any part of her body touch Q’s back. There were two slender welts across his back, one just below his shoulderblades and one lower, near the middle of his back. The skin was broken on the second one, but if it had bled at all, Q’s shower would have washed the evidence away. And T’Laren could confirm that she hadn’t touched him anywhere near either welt.

She reached out and very gently touched his shoulder. “Does that hurt?”

“No, but it must be the only place that doesn’t.”

“Tell me when you start to feel any pain or discomfort.”

“What are you going to do?” He almost started to roll to his side, then apparently thought better of it.

“I’m going to run a finger along your back, as gently as I can, to find the point where the sensitization starts.”

“Did you maybe try looking at where she _hit_ me?”

“Yes. The injuries are very minor.”

Q turned his head and glared at her. “Oh, I see. I’m just moaning about nothing again, right? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with me and I’m just being a giant hypochondriac because I feel like she dumped acid all over my back but the injuries are only _minor._”

T’Laren was startled by his vitriol, although given what he’d put up with on the starbase, she realized belatedly that her choice of words was very poor. “No, no, that’s not what I mean at all. Q, this was a neurowhip. A neurostimulation weapon. Races that are still barbaric enough to use torture, but advanced enough to travel in space, almost always use neurostimulation, and it’s not because it’s more humane. The physical damage it causes is small or nonexistent, but the pain is excruciating.”

“Oh, believe me, you don’t need to tell _me_ that.”

“I know. I’m validating you. The point to a neurostimulation weapon is to hurt, a great deal, without risking the life or health of the victim. And a neurowhip is supposed to be a fairly mild neurostimulator, and it shouldn’t have left welts over this length of time, or broken the skin. Does this hurt?” She touched a spot between his shoulderblades, several centimeters away from the actual welt, very gently. He cried out.

“_Yes_, that hurts! I told you to be careful!”

“That was not even close to the welt. This is what I was afraid of.”

“Afraid of? And what do you mean not even close?”

“I mean that you’re continuing to experience considerable pain in parts of your body that suffered no physical damage whatsoever and are several centimeters away from where she hit you. That’s not standard for a neurowhip. She had it turned up to maximum and she hit you as hard as she possibly could.” Stick Yalit to the bulkhead with a carving knife and then use a cheese grater to peel off the skin on her face. After fastening her tongue to her chin with a protoplaser. “Q... you mustn’t be ashamed of anything you said or did after this attack. She tortured you. The good news is that because the physical damage is slight – most of the pain is being caused by the nerves being oversensitized – you will probably feel no more than a mild ache by tomorrow. But unfortunately your value to them won’t be compromised if she uses it again. You have to be very careful.”

His breathing had grown ragged. “She wants transwarp.”

“Give it to her. A neurowhip is a slaver’s weapon – it’s simply supposed to deliver a brief burst of pain, to keep a slave working without impairing their ability to work. If Yalit is willing to actually hit you this hard with it… there’s no telling what she might do to you.” She squeezed his hand.

“The Continuum won’t want me to.”

“They’ll have to understand. No human can resist this level of pain indefinitely. I have seen Starfleet officers sign false confessions under less duress than this.”

“They don’t _have_ to understand anything. They don’t know that pain hurts. Which is to say, they _know_, they just don’t _care._ I know, I was one of them. They won’t forgive it if I break. Which I’ve already done. So not only am I the captive of a torturer who plans to sell me into slavery, but now the Continuum will never take me home again. So could you _please_ break my neck? Or something, I heard there’s a Vulcan death grip.”

“I’m not going to break your neck.”

“I could tie a shirt around my neck and strangle myself with it, but if you didn’t stop me the Ferengi would.” He sounded like he was brainstorming, trying to come up with a solution that would let him die and working it out aloud, rather than actually conversing with her.

“You don’t know for certain that the Continuum won’t forgive you. You thought they would kill you for trying to stop the Borg.”

“The Borg needed a spanking anyway. This is different.” He pulled his pillow over his head. “Probably a test anyway. Maybe Lhoviri put the transwarp drive on this thing just to see if I was enough of a coward to give it away to a materialistic little troll. With a whip. Are you sure you won’t break my neck?” The pillow muffled his words, but not enough that she couldn’t understand him.

“No. Although perhaps there is something I can do.” She examined the welt where the skin was broken. “This isn’t bleeding enough that we need to be overly worried about infection, which is good because I don’t believe the alcohol content of the grapes would be sufficient to sterilize the wound, but they _should_ function as a painkiller.”

“The grapes?”

“Yes. The ones Yalit had sent over yesterday, that you said were alcoholic?”

“Oh. Yeah. You saved them?”

“I ate a few more, but yes, I still have quite a few.”

“I tried real alcohol a few times. It’s overhyped in my opinion. Synthehol works just as well at numbing the pain of existence and doesn’t result in one’s head exploding the next morning. Or vomiting.”

“I believe you’re correct, but we don’t have any synthehol.”

“Well, then, give me some grapes. I have never in my existence needed to get drunk quite as badly as I do right now.”

She got the bowl, sat down on the bed next to him and handed him three of them. As he ate them, wincing, she had a sudden ridiculous mental image. With Q lying on the bed with a royal purple bathrobe draped over part of his body, the fact that she was feeding him grapes made her suddenly see herself as a harem girl. It took far greater an effort than it should have to control the urge to giggle. Given how much Q was suffering, that would be beyond inappropriate. To drive out the unwanted image, she looked back at Q’s injuries, at the drawn expression on his face. It worked, if the goal was solely to get rid of the undesired hilarity; she was overwhelmed instead with the urge to take him in her arms, to meld with him and draw his pain into herself, to touch him and soothe the pain away. That wasn’t actually any more appropriate than the urge to laugh. What was _wrong_ with her emotional state? Why couldn’t she get control?

On the other hand, perhaps it was less inappropriate than she thought. Was there anything inherently wrong with the idea of helping him with his pain? “There is a possibility I could suggest,” she said.

“A possibility you could suggest? That has to be the vaguest, most qualified sentence I have ever heard out of your mouth. What are you talking about?”

“A way to help you with your pain. If I were to meld with you—”

“No.”

“—I could absorb the pain myself. My disciplines—”

“I said no!”

“Q, don’t tense up, you’ll hurt yourself.”

“What part of no—”

“It was merely a suggestion.”

“But you _knew_ I’d say no, so why did you even get my hopes up?”

“I didn’t. You told me once – I believe what you said was ‘I’m phobic, not stupid.’ If you had a good reason to accept a meld—”

“What, so I’m stupid for saying no?”

“You’re in excruciating pain. I could _help_ you. You know that a human’s mind can’t be absorbed or destroyed in a mindmeld the way you’ve described the Q consuming each other—”

“Tell that to tr’Sahlassiu.”

“He was trying to steal knowledge and then kill you. I would be taking your pain away. I think there’s a rather large difference.”

“I said _no._”

“Then the answer is no. That’s acceptable. I only wanted to help.”

He said nothing for a minute or two, long enough that she thought he might have dropped the subject. “I just… if the thing with tr’Sahlassiu hadn’t happened… maybe. But not now. I… can’t. Not even for this.”

She stroked his hair, running her fingers through it. The muscles of his scalp were horribly tense. She started to reach toward his temples to rub them, found herself opening her telepathy as if preparing for a link, and pulled her hand back. He’d said no. He really had been traumatized by the incident with the Romulan, as much as he’d successfully pretended otherwise. She understood that. Why was she almost on automatic pilot, then? Why was the impulse to meld with him so powerful she had for a moment almost forgotten he’d said no?

“T’Laren?” There was an odd note in Q’s voice. Not the strain his injury had placed in it, something else. His notes were more clipped than usual, his voice more rigid. Had he realized what she had almost unconsciously done?

“Yes?” she asked, controlling her own voice.

“Remember our discussion about grated aspirin?”

She blinked. It was hard to think clearly. “What?”

“I’ve had real alcohol before. It doesn’t taste like this. Whatever they were putting in your food, they put it in these grapes too.” He took a deep breath. “I couldn’t tell at first; between the alcohol and enough sugar to kill a diabetic instantly, I needed to eat a few before I could tell for sure. But it’s definitely the same taste.”

They hadn’t stopped poisoning her. The peace offering they’d given her had more of the drug, just masked. Abruptly everything made sense. T’Laren went ice cold. They wouldn’t have given her a relatively harmless prank drug like dicydrenaline, and then told her what it was, and then kept giving it to her. She could just fast, after all. They needed to trick her into taking enough of something to trigger a reaction that wouldn’t stop. Something where by the time she realized they were still drugging her, there would be enough of it in her system that the reaction would be irreversible.

They’d been giving her _farr t’gahn._

“I’m sorry,” Q said, and his voice broke. “I thought—I thought I’d managed to make them leave you alone. But even when Yalit thought I was telling the truth about transwarp, she was still doing this. I never had the power to stop them at all, and I—I’ve got nothing to bargain with, I can’t force them to stop. I tried. I’m s-sorry.”

The last word came out on a full-fledged sob. He pressed his face into the pillows, obviously trying to get himself under control. Did he know? No, they’d told him dicydrenaline, and he had neither the psychopharmaceutical training nor the personal experience to know the difference. He thought she was essentially drunk because they were drugging her. He didn’t know she was dead.

_I might be able to stop it. It’s caused by a drug, not a real cycle. Vulcans have survived when it was caused by an external influence before—a virus, mind control, perhaps even a drug. They might not have dosed me enough to make it irreversible. Perhaps with meditation, I can overcome it._

_Or perhaps if I kill some of the Ferengi. Blood fever can be quenched by blood, sometimes. Isn’t that what they say?_

_No, ridiculous. I’m not going to kill anyone. I’d hardly have the opportunity. I just have to overcome this with discipline. That’s all. Others have._

Others who were far more disciplined to begin with than she was.

But she had to defeat it somehow. If her cycle had been triggered, the only person who _could_ satisfy her need would be Q. And if he wasn’t willing to meld with her to eliminate the pain of being tortured, he certainly wouldn’t be willing to do it to fulfill her sexual need. Given that the alternative, if she couldn’t control it, was her death, he might offer himself—Q had been willing to sacrifice his life to save people who meant less to him than she apparently did. He might well consider giving himself up to be raped an acceptable sacrifice to save her life… but it _would_ be rape, regardless. Even aside from his sexual hang-ups, he was terrified of intimate mental contact. He’d already _been_ mentally violated, by a Vulcanoid telepath no less. She couldn’t do that to him. She _would_ rather die.

But it wouldn’t come to that. Because she was going to get it under control. Somehow.

“It’s all right,” she said, and was proud of how calm her voice was. “It’s not your fault. Do what you must; don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

* * *

_You are so stupid._ The voice in his head mocked him, as if, not having the Continuum around to tell him what a loser he was, he had to create a model of them in his head to do it for them. _She says she could take the pain away. She __wants__ to do it. And here you are trembling in terror because some Romulan telepath tried to assassinate you. What an idiot._

He almost opened his mouth to tell T’Laren he’d changed his mind, he wanted her to help him, if only to make the mocking voice go away. It was one thing to deal with that little voice when he was alone, or when no one he cared about was in his environs, which had been most of the time before he’d met T’Laren. It was something else entirely to feel as if someone whose opinion actually mattered might be agreeing with his own self-mockery. He already knew that there was an element of his own mind that thought he was an idiot, a pathetic excuse for a Q and an even more pathetic excuse for a human being, but believing that someone he cared about might think so too was almost unbearable. And then, of course, there was the fact that the pain was so horrible he would do almost anything to make it go away.

_Almost_ anything. When he started to speak, he remembered tr’Sahlassiu’s attack, remembered the feeling of an alien mind inside his own, and his complete inability to keep the invader out. And yes, T’Laren was right – a Vulcanoid telepath couldn’t absorb a human mind and devour it the way the Q could do to one another. But that had never been the point.

“You must think I’m an idiot.” He said it almost without thinking, and was embarrassed to hear it come out of his mouth – it was such a naked plea for validation, it would have completely humiliated him to have said it if he hadn’t been so badly humiliated already today. As it was, though… it was embarrassing, but he really _did_ need her to know he had good reasons for what he had chosen. And that he hadn’t meant to screw up nearly this badly, and how sorry he was for what was happening to her, but mainly he needed to know that she didn’t think he was a total moron.

“Why would I think such a thing?”

“I know… what you’re offering… I _know_ it’s the only real way to stop this pain that we’ve got. I’m not stupid. I just…”

“I understand, Q. You don’t need to explain yourself.”

“But I do. Because you don’t understand. So you probably think I’m an idiot.”

She sighed. She was actually very emotional lately; Q would be surprised, except that they were prisoners and he was pretty sure the stress of the situation would get to a normal Vulcan, let alone one who was self-admittedly bad at maintaining her control. “I don’t think less of you for refusing my offer. You explained your feelings regarding mindmelds a month ago. I hadn’t forgotten.”

“You quoted my own words back at me like you thought I was an idiot for turning you down.”

“You’ve been attacked telepathically since you said those words.”

“Yes. That.” He took a deep breath. “Do you know what he wanted to do to me?”

“My understanding was that he planned to kill you.”

“Because he couldn’t actually do what he really wanted. I fought back.”

“Oh. Yes. He told me he wanted information on how to break you. He thought I would know your emotional weaknesses, and that he could use my knowledge to make you submissive, so he wouldn’t have to kill you. When I refused he said he would need to kill you if he couldn’t break you, and I told him I was sure you’d rather die.”

“You were right.”

Her hand ran through his hair. “I would never do such a thing to you, Q. If you consented to a mindmeld, I would never violate your trust in such a way.”

“Yeah, I know that. I don’t… If I trusted anyone it’d be you, T’Laren.”

“But you don’t trust anyone.”

“About fifty thousand years ago or something, I really have a hard time keeping track of how long ago things happened in mortal time when I was a Q, when I was still basically a kid, five older Q jumped me and tried to rewrite my personality by force.”

The hand in his hair went still. “The Q do such things to one another?... But you’ve already said children devour each other, so I suppose that would be no different…”

“Wrong, actually. Children devour each other, but when you’re almost an adult, you know better. Because when one Q absorbs another, what survives is the strongest traits. The strongest ego is the one that comes out on top, and I have a stronger ego than most other Q.” For a moment he grinned, before the pain made the fleeting moment of amusement impossible to hold onto. “No one wanted to eat me, and I didn’t want to absorb anyone else, because we all knew I’d win but I didn’t want to change. I didn’t want to absorb any part of anyone else. The Q let kids do that to each other because it weeds out weaknesses… mostly. What survives is always stronger than the individual parts were. Rewriting someone’s personality… is different.” He lifted his head to look at her, although that hurt, too. “It’s sort of like raping someone, murdering them, mutilating the corpse and raising it as an undead zombie, who you then try to pass off as your roommate Fred. It’s one of the worst things we can do to one another, and it’s considered an extremely serious crime. But, well… I was winning friends and influencing people even back then, and these guys hated me enough that they thought that if they just went ahead and did it, it would be a fait accompli, and so many people would be grateful to them for making me less of an asshole that they’d be given a slap on the wrist.”

“I take it it didn’t work?”

“It would have worked.” He let his head down onto the pillow again, staring at the wall. “They had my defenses down – I was tough, I could have fought off any other one Q, maybe even two. Against five I didn’t have a chance. They lured me into a pocket dimension that wasn’t a direct part of the Continuum proper, and then they opened me up, blocked me off so I couldn’t call for help and started doing major surgery on my mind.” He took a deep breath. “There’s a Q who used to like to follow me around to keep me out of trouble – my older sister, kind of. She was one of the caretaker Q and I was always getting in trouble so she was always taking care of me. Usually that meant making me clean up my messes and giving me a lecture, but on a few rare occasions she actually had to save me from some sort of danger. So she found me before they could actually finalize their changes – it’s not like actual surgery or the way humans manipulate things in the real world, you plot out every step of what you do and then when you have the plan in your mind you just _do_ it, like you throw a switch and the thing that’s in your mind becomes real, and since they were plotting a change on _me_ using Q powers and I was as Q as they were, I could see everything they wanted to do, every plan they were making. I could _feel_ it like it was real, although it wasn’t yet.”

“She stopped them?”

“She called in the rest of the Continuum. Maybe if they _had_ managed a fait accompli they would have gotten a slap on the wrist, but since they didn’t actually succeed and I was still the same brat I always had been, they were stripped of their powers and thrown out of the Continuum.”

“Were they considered children too, or were they adults?”

“The line was really blurry at that point. Probably not as adult as I am right now, but definitely older than I was then. But we’d have done the same to actual children. There are things the Q don’t tolerate doing to one another. Otherwise they’d have rewritten _my_ mind and I’d still be with them, except I wouldn’t be me anymore.”

“You told me that you feared mindmelds because the Q all fear mental intimacy, because you can be absorbed into each other.”

“Oh, we do, and we can, and I did think that was the main reason. That, and when other Q can read behind your shields they generally go out of their way to mock you for it, so the idea that other people can read my mind and I can’t read theirs is something I have about a million years of being humiliated with, so it’s not like I’m ever going to be happy about it.” He tried to shrug, but it hurt, so he aborted the movement. “This thing was fifty thousand years ago. It wasn’t exactly at the top of my mind; I never thought about it. I barely even remembered it until tr’Sahlassiu tried to do the exact same damn thing.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice sounded oddly hoarse, almost as if _she_ was about to cry. He looked back up at her again, but her face was as still and calm as it always was. He was hearing things, reading too much into it. She wasn’t _that_ bad at emotional control… well, except that the Ferengi had been drugging her, but the idea that she might _cry_ over something that had happened to him fifty thousand years ago was ridiculous.

“It’s not – I’m not – you know, I haven’t been going around moaning about how traumatized I am because someone tried to make me someone else, when I was younger. It’s just… I fought back this time. He was only going to kill me, because he couldn’t get my defenses down far enough that he could rewrite me. I would have died cleanly… because you’re right, being changed like that is a fate worse than death. So, you know, I shouldn’t be so upset about it. But… I didn’t _trust_ them. They used brute force. And I didn’t trust him, so he couldn’t do it.”

“Are you trying to say that you trust me too much to trust me? I find that paradoxic even for you.”

It would have hurt to laugh, so he grinned instead. “Oh, I can get far more paradoxic than that. Believe me. But… yes. If I did let you in… I know you wouldn’t _try_ to turn me into someone else, but, you know, you’ve spent the entire time we’ve known each other trying to turn me into less of an asshole, and you once threatened to throw me out an airlock because you thought it would teach me a lesson, and that’s what the Q do… and I’d never voluntarily let one of _them_ in that deeply either, not so deep I couldn’t throw them back out again, and you’re more powerful than me. In terms of telepathy. I couldn’t stop you. I’m not even sure I’d know you were doing it.”

“I see.”

“I don’t… I’m not trying to insult you. I don’t think you’d ever deliberately hurt me, but… you want me to change my behavior so I’ll be a better person, or happier, or whatever. Most of our entire relationship is built on that. And even though I fired you, I don’t know. If you had the opportunity to just make a little tweak here or there, would you take it?”

“It would be very, very difficult. As you say, your ego is very strong. And our relative power levels mean little in a mindmeld; I could start it, and I doubt you could break it against my will, but your ego could probably override mine more easily than the other way around.” She pulled her hand away. “But I will not violate your trust. If you don’t wish me to meld with you to try to help you with the pain… I’m not offended. It’s better this way. Because Caesar’s wife must be above reproach. If there’s even the chance that you would believe I had mentally raped you, I would rather not expose either of us to that. I would much rather…” Her voice did break then. “I would much rather keep your trust, and your friendship, than to solve any fleeting medical problem in a way that ruins what bond we do have.”

Q sat up into a kneeling position on the bed, gasping at the sudden agony in his back. “T’Laren? Are you all right?” There were _tears_ in her eyes. Oh, if he ever did get his powers back, the entire Continuum would be unable to prevent him from de-evolving Yalit and her goons into lizards. Or fruit flies.

“It’s the drugs,” she said. “My control – my control-“ She took a deep breath. He could _see_ her forcing her emotions down, shoving them in a box. The process took longer and was more visible than he’d ever seen it on her. Or any other Vulcan.

“Is there something you need? A drink of water?” A trick he had learned fairly early in his sentence to humanity – when one was on the verge of tears, drinking something, anything, could keep your breathing regulated, stop the sobs before they started.

“No.” She breathed deeply again. “I am in control. For the moment.”

“Okay, good.” He didn’t want to lay back down. He was exhausted, but sitting up had been excruciating, and laying down the first time had been as well, and he didn’t want to deal with the pain just yet. It was easier to deal with the exhaustion. Q carefully got off the bed and stood up, taking care not to let any pressure land on the back of his legs. “You said this will feel better in the morning?”

“It should. The reason for the pain is neural overstimulation – the same reason why, if you look at a bright light too long, you see blobs of light in your vision when you look away. Eventually the nerves will calm down and the pain will recede.”

“Then I’m going to eat all your grapes and hopefully get drunk enough to pass out. Since you shouldn’t be eating them, with the drug in them.” A thought occurred to him. “That dicydrenaline stuff is safe for humans, though, right?”

“I doubt the drug in the grapes will affect you in any way.”

“Good.” He grabbed a handful of the remaining grapes and stuffed them into his mouth. The bitter aftertaste was tolerable if he kept putting new grapes, with their overpowering sweetness, into his mouth and biting them open before the bitterness of the last grapes had a chance to settle in. He didn’t much like the taste of real alcohol in the first place, and the sweetness would have been cloyingly overpowering if not for the terrible bitter taste of the drug and the somewhat less bitter taste of the liquor, but it was medicine, so he took it.

T’Laren brought him a glass of water. “If your goal is to consume enough alcohol that it will dull the pain or help you sleep, you should make sure to drink plenty of water. This is real alcohol, not synthehol. You’ll have a hangover in the morning if you don’t stay hydrated.”

“I’ve tried real alcohol before. I’m aware of the issue of hangovers.”

The alcohol burned the back of his throat, making the bad taste less and less of an issue. He was actually starting to feel a little woozy. Good. With the pain he felt right now, total unconsciousness would have been ideal; if a bit of wooziness was the best he could get, he was all for it.

“When they bring dinner, should I let you know?”

“No.” The pain nauseated him, the alcohol numbed his throat, the stress killed his appetite – there was no way he was eating anything tonight. “I have no intention of diluting any medicinal effect I might be able to get out of these things by filling my stomach with food instead. You can have mine, whatever it is. Just pick the meat out of it.”

“I find I’m not particularly hungry either.”

“Yeah, but _you_ should be diluting your drugs, and if you store up water like chipmunks store nuts in their cheeks, the only way you’re going to do it is by eating more food.”

“It no longer matters. Now that I understand what’s happening, I don’t think diluting the drug will have much effect one way or another.”

“Do what you want, then. I’m not your dad.” The role reversal in him telling T’Laren she should eat made him chortle, which made him remember how much pain his back was in, which made him stop laughing after he’d barely started. Well, at least he wouldn’t be a giggly drunk. He’d eaten almost nothing today – breakfast however many hours ago, and the grapes now, and that was it – so the alcohol was hitting him hard and fast. Good. If he threw up at least it would be dry heaves. And if his goal was to quickly achieve unconsciousness, he thought he might actually get there before he ran out of grapes. He was feeling distinctly dizzy now, and his body felt sluggish, unresponsive. “I’m planning to pass out shortly. If I throw up while I’m asleep, and it looks like I might choke to death on my own vomit, let me.”

“It doesn’t matter how many times you ask me, Q. I’m not going to kill you, or let you die.” She took his hand. “I promised you I wouldn’t let harm come to you, when I took you off the starbase. I may not be able to prevent Yalit from hurting you, but I won’t do you harm myself, or let you come to any harm I can prevent.” In a feat of unconscious irony, she was squeezing his hand hard enough that it hurt.

“Then watch the hand, Superwoman. I’m a fragile human, remember?”

She let go instantly. “I – I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“—To hurt me, yes, I know. I got that. I know you’ve got yourself barely under control and it’s not your fault but can you watch the getting physical? You don’t seem to know your own strength anymore.” His speech sounded slurred to him. That was actually funny. He seemed to recall from the brief time he’d spent frequenting bars on the starbase before he’d gotten beaten up in one that drunk people frequently felt the need to point out that they were drunk, and he’d always wondered why they did that. Perhaps it was because, being drunk, they didn’t realize how incredibly obvious it was from their speech. Of course, he was much, much smarter than the average drunk human, so he could clearly tell that other people would be able to hear the alcohol in his speech, which meant that he was of course not going to mention it, because it was obvious. He started to laugh again. This time the pain in his back was a lot less.

“Are you all right?” T’Laren asked.

“Am I all _right?_ I’m _drunk._” He laughed again. “You see, I knew I would say it. Even though I just said to myself, of course I’m not going to say it, because it’s obvious, so it goes without saying. But it’s something about the human brain chemistry. You can’t _prevent_ yourself from telling other people that you’re drunk. Even though they know you’re drunk, because your voice is slurred and you sound completely drunk. They should rename it the Stating the Obvious Drug. Although humans are pretty good at that even without getting drunk. For instance, why do human men insist on telling beautiful women that they’re beautiful? Don’t they already know? But maybe the men are drunk too. That sort of thing does seem to go on a lot in bars. And lounges. Which are not the same thing. You knew that, though, right? That they’re not the same thing? So I’m stating the obvious again?”

“I’m going to let you sleep. Perhaps you should save the rest of those grapes.”

“What, all two of them? What would I save them for? To get _you_ drunk? Because didn’t the Ferengi already do that?”

“There’s actually eleven left, and I doubt they could get you drunk, but if Yalit uses a neurowhip on you again they’re all we have to help you with. I don’t think you need more tonight.”

“Oh, but they’re so tasty.” He snickered. “That’s a joke. They taste horrible. I know you like them, but that’s because you’re a Vulcan and you have no taste. Literally. Although actually to be literally I’d have to bite you or lick you or something and discover you don’t taste like anything.”

She shuddered slightly, her eyes widening. Q was surprised. “That was a joke, too, T’Laren. I’m not going to bite you. You’re being ri… ricu… I can’t believe I’m so drunk I forgot how to say ricudilous. Ridiculous. Right, that’s it. See, it’s rid… that thing I forgot how to say.”

“I’m not afraid of you biting me, Q.”

“You’re a liar. And you’re not a very good one. I saw you… tremble, or something. I know your emotional control isn’t good but it’s really ri… I keep saying that word and it doesn’t work because I can’t say that word. Ridiculous. Which sums up this whole situation. But anyway I was saying that it’s ricu… ridiculous for you to be trembling because I joked about tasting you. I mean, I admit it was a bad joke, but I _am_ drunk. Oh, hey, is that why they do it? Maybe they keep saying how they’re drunk because they want people to forgive them for really bad jokes and the fact that they can’t say ridiculous.”

“I did not _tremble_. And if I had it wouldn’t have been because I was afraid.” She took a deep breath. “You’ll be all right. I’m going to let you sleep now. Because I will _not_ do anything to harm you.”

And then she left, carrying the rest of the grapes. Q tried to sit up, annoyed that she’d suddenly abandoned him and planning to follow her out of the room, but firstly, the pain in his back, while much muted by the alcohol, was far from gone, and the sudden motion made it spring back to life like a wild animal leaping on him, and secondly, the entire room swayed wildly and he realized that if he felt dizzy and sluggish while lying down, sitting wasn’t going to improve matters and standing or walking were probably out of the question. He took another sip of his water, since his mouth felt dry, and then laid back down, remembering at the last second not to flop because that would probably hurt a lot. Maybe he was drunk enough that if he closed his eyes he’d fall asleep.

* * *

Predictably, Q felt awful in the morning. His mouth was furry and his head was pounding. At least his back was significantly improved; the fiery awful pain everywhere from yesterday had dulled to three distinct lines of terrible soreness where the whip had actually hit him. He was more queasy than actually nauseous, and probably could eat breakfast if he forced himself to, but the idea wasn’t very appealing.

What really made him feel horrible, though, was the memory of what had happened yesterday. He was beaten completely. If he didn’t do every little thing Yalit wanted, she had demonstrated she had no qualms about torturing him, and the fact that he hadn’t killed himself in response more or less called his bluff. What very little power he’d had in this situation was gone.

He wished desperately that he really did have the power to kill himself. Or that T’Laren had been willing to snap his neck for him. There were no fixtures on the ceiling he could use to hang himself, and the one time he’d experimented with strangling himself to death with his own clothes, he’d come to the conclusion that he simply couldn’t do it; no matter how badly he wanted to die at the time, the sensation of choking to death would inevitably lead to him scrabbling to pull the tourniquet off his neck. He didn’t have enough freedom of motion to space himself out the airlock, and he didn’t have any weapons or poisons. There was no choice but to obey… and the worst of it was it was quite plausible that Yalit might decide to punish him for something intangible, like a bad attitude or being surly or sarcastic. He would actually have to _be_ subservient, not just obey grudgingly. But if he went too far she’d probably decide he was being sarcastic and torture him. Or let her flunkies rape T’Laren to get to him; one could argue that he was obviously and unavoidably impaired in his work if _he_ was tortured, but they could do anything they wanted to her without causing him a physical impairment. He couldn’t face the kind of pain Yalit had proved herself willing to cause him for any reason, and he couldn’t face the thought that T’Laren would suffer any more than she already had for what he had done.

“Are you sure you won’t snap my neck?” he asked T’Laren as he left his bedroom. She was already awake, or possibly had never gone to sleep, and was practicing martial arts.

“Positive.” She kicked the wall with sufficient speed and force to snap _someone’s_ neck, although from the angle it was more likely to be a Ferengi than him.

His escort arrived. “Human. It’s time to go earn your keep,” the Ferengi guard said.

“Hey, I don’t get breakfast first?”

“You can eat grubworms on the job like the rest of us,” the guard said, snickering. “Come on.”

So they didn’t intend to feed him decent food anymore now that they’d proven they didn’t have to. Fine. Q had gone five days without food to make Eleanor take the monitors out of his room, after his second suicide attempt; he didn’t have to eat the grubworms. He would just starve, and when he collapsed they would realize they needed to feed him something he could actually eat. “As long as there’s coffee,” he said.

“And what if there isn’t?”

“Then I’ll be significantly stupider and slower than usual. Not that you could tell the difference, but if your grandma wants my brain at peak performance, I need coffee. Beating me up won’t help me think better.”

“Fine. You can have coffee. And share our meal.” The Ferengi snickered again.

Q looked over at T’Laren. She wasn’t looking at him or the Ferengi; she was still exercising violently, her entire concentration on the imaginary foe she seemed to be fighting. “T’Laren? Are you going to be all right?” If they weren’t feeding him, they probably weren’t feeding her, either.

“Fine,” she said shortly. Clearly she didn’t want to talk to him.

She was within her rights – he had gotten them into this situation and couldn’t get them out, and every bad thing that happened to her now was his fault. Still, it was very upsetting to him that she was ignoring him. The burden of despair and guilt and fear on him intensified. To all intents and purposes, he was alone in the worst situation he’d ever been in, in his human life. But then, he’d been alone for all the other bad situations, too. He was just going to have to deal with it.

Swallowing hard and looking away so he could pretend he didn’t care, Q turned back to the Ferengi. “Fine. Let’s go get that coffee and get to work.” He wasn’t going to able to pretend to be enthusiastic about this job, but if he pretended he was at least working as voluntarily as he had with Starfleet, maybe Yalit wouldn’t complain about his attitude or something.

* * *

_Control._ Q was gone. The maddening delicious scent of male human still lay over absolutely everything in the room, but at least the source of it was gone. And the sight of him, and the sound of his voice. She could get her control back. Maybe.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It had never been like this before. Before it had always been triggered by Soram, by his need, so there was never any holding back. Perhaps there was some frustration, some anticipation, before they could be alone together, because of course proper Vulcans wouldn’t carry on in public even if they were dying, but they had served together in Starfleet – years ago Vulcans had pressured Starfleet, otherwise an organization openly hostile to families, into establishing that married Vulcan partners both serving in Starfleet could _not_ be transferred to separate ships under any circumstances. She had never _had_ to control the pon farr before; it had always been a wonderful excuse for letting go, for no longer having to maintain the rigid control that chafed at her so badly. The fact that theoretically it could be life-threatening if unfulfilled was hardly a consideration, because it would be fulfilled, no question.

She could die of this. It was quite possible. Vulcans rarely died anymore; interacting with so many other species had taken the edge off some of the stupider cultural traditions. Nowadays Vulcan men who went into pon farr without their wives were allowed by custom and culture to fulfill their need with a willing alien, a fellow Vulcan who was unmarried if they could find one, or a prostitute as long as the prostitute was not a slave or coerced into their work in any way. Vulcan women who were not choosers were allowed the same, and choosers as well, provided that they were certain that the substitute man was both willing and was their own free choice, so they didn’t risk unleashing bloodlust against him. But in the past, when it was considered too shameful to talk about and all Vulcans of the right age were married and a Vulcan couldn’t even admit to a non-Vulcan what the problem was, men had died, and sometimes women as well. It was usually less powerful, less deadly for a woman because it was triggered by her telepathic bond with her husband, and women who were weaker telepaths were less affected – or women who, whatever their level of power, had chosen to hold themselves aloof from their men. A woman who was a strong telepath, or a chooser who had made her choice, though – they could die of it, and they had.

And T’Laren’s telepathy was irrelevant in this case. _Farr t’gahn_ was a Romulan aphrodisiac, a sophisticated pharmaceutical that triggered the remnant Romulans had of _pon farr_. Vulcans weren’t sure, but believed that Romulans had either practiced selective breeding or genetic manipulation to get rid of the weakness of _pon farr_, and probably only then discovered that it was tied to telepathy. The period the Romulans called _pafaren_ was a time of heightened sexual arousal, and magnification of whatever tiny telepathic ability Romulans had, channeled into intimate relations. It occurred at random in both sexes and was considered a highly entertaining nuisance, rather like getting drunk would be if you could get drunk against your will off your own biochemistry.

_Farr t’gahn_ had been created by the Romulans to trigger their own much milder Time, for pleasure, but since Vulcans and Romulans were still biologically almost identical, it could also be used to push Vulcans into _pon farr._ The Romulans had discovered at some point that administering it to male Vulcan captives made it possible to rape them, force them to breed against their will with Romulan women, who would then raise the half-Vulcan, telepathic children to join the Romulan secret police. Of course it had always been possible for Romulan men to rape Vulcan women, but the _farr t’gahn_ was used to break the victims’ will, making it less likely that they could use biocontrol to prevent pregnancy.

Melor had explained all of this to T’Laren after he’d discovered she was a spy, when he’d felt betrayed and enraged and had wanted to terrorize her with the knowledge of her fate. Perhaps if she’d simply thought she would be killed, she wouldn’t have violated every ethical principle Vulcans had regarding telepathy to seduce Melor, force a mindlink on him, and save herself by rewriting his memories.

The drug essentially caused _pon farr_ in any adult Vulcan, male or female. It didn’t matter that she was a woman, and her telepathy was only relevant in that she would need to mindlink with any man she had sex with or it wouldn’t satisfy her. Not that that would stop her. The utter humiliation of what she faced if she lost control burned through her. She would need sex, crave it from any man however repulsive, would be driven to beg for it or try to force men into it… and if the men who gave it to her were the Ferengi, it wouldn’t _work_, and she would still die. Humiliated beyond measure, broken, begging, dignity shattered, and she would still die.

If it was Q, she would live. Because if she was broken by her need, she would force a mindlink on him. But he had made it very clear last night that, like Vulcans, he considered that rape, and she would rather die than harm him.

She had to get this under control. She _had_ to. The restless energy burning through her hadn’t let her sleep last night, and she’d lost interest in food, which was just as well as it didn’t seem the Ferengi were interested in feeding her. The only thing that controlled the need even slightly was hard physical activity… but when she grew physically tired and couldn’t keep doing calisthenics or katas or any other workout, the need was still there. Q’s presence hadn’t helped. All night she had wanted so badly to go to him, to kiss him and nibble on his cool human skin and open him up, sink herself into his mind and lose herself in him. Impale herself on him, pound and grind, use his body and mind, be inside him and around him and hold him inside her. He would have been horrified if he knew. He had never _had_ sex as a mortal. There was no way she could do this to him, no way she could take him the way she wanted to take him. She’d almost lost it last night when he’d gotten drunk on the grapes and made a stupid pun about tasting her, and she’d imagined his tongue on her skin and came dangerously close to jumping him. She’d almost even rationalized it to herself – he was drunk, his inhibitions were lowered, she _knew_ he was physically attracted to her, if she was ever going to get him to agree and not be traumatized by the whole thing wouldn’t that have been the right time? But she knew better – getting someone drunk so they’d agree to sex with you when they wouldn’t agree if sober was still rape.

The door opened. Four of the Ferengi entered the room. She looked over at them, felt a pulse of rage that they had done this to her, and turned away deliberately so they wouldn’t see the fury in her eyes. “Is there something I can do for you?” she asked, punching the air repeatedly, watching her form. Strike, strike, strike. That one was bad; if she’d actually hit someone with it she might have hurt her thumb.

“I think maybe there’s something we can do for _you_,” one of them said, giggling. He stroked his ears.

There was no logic, no reason to the rage that filled her. But she was still Vulcan. She could control it long enough. “Really? What is it you think you can do for me?”

They all laughed, a sound that grated horribly on her ears. One of them stepped forward. “I hear you might be having a little problem? A little frustration?” They all laughed again. “Something your human no-lobe eunuch can’t do for you?”

“And what would that be?”

He came closer, one hand on his crotch. “Maybe a little bit of—”

She didn’t let him finish the sentence. Her fist slammed into his neck. Ferengi faces were tougher, denser than most humanoid skulls, but their necks were as vulnerable as any other humanoid. Before he had even fallen she was moving, leaping past him. She grabbed the next closest one by his ears and swung him violently, using his own thrashing legs as weapons against the other two, and finished by yanking on the lobes hard enough to rip them. Then she flung him aside and went for the two she had hit with their fellow.

One had his phaser out. She hit his hand hard enough that the phaser went flying across the room, then punched him full force in the solar plexus with her other hand. The fourth man screamed and ran out the door.

“You want me? You want to fuck me?” T’Laren screamed after him. “You can fuck my fist up your ass, you sons of a diseased whore! Come on! You wanted fun, let’s have—” She stomped brutally hard on the man she’d just dropped. “FUN!”

Her whole body tingled. She felt numb, sluggish, but still alive, still mobile and enraged. She spun around and almost fell over, dizzy and disassociated from her body, and saw the first man she’d attacked, the one she’d hit in the throat, holding a phaser on her. He was trembling and shaking. “Fuck it’s on _stun_ she’s not stunned she’s not _stunned_—”

“I tell you what,” T’Laren said, almost conversationally. “You can try to reset that phaser to kill, and I can snap your fucking little monster neck before you can get it reset and fired. Or you can run for your life. Right now.”

He ran. He ran, and the one whose lobes she’d torn ran, and the one whose ribs she’d just stomped on and broken rolled, moaned, and got to his feet and ran. It took all the control she had left to let them, not to follow them and tear their heads off.

And then they were gone, and she started to shake violently. No. She hadn’t just tried to kill four men with her bare hands and no plan, she hadn’t just taken a stun as if it were almost nothing. She hadn’t just screamed obscenities at a fleeing man. This wasn’t her, this wasn’t who she was.

She was now, again, the woman who had murdered Soram.

She knew why she’d done that now. She knew what was wrong with her. She was a chooser.

T’Laren started to laugh hysterically, because she finally knew why her biological father had died. It all made sense. Why had a human man and his wife adopted a Vulcan child? Oh, T’Lal had been best friends with Roger and Helene Dorset. Oh, of course. And that explained why she hadn’t let her own family, far-flung across starships as it was, take in her daughter? Why her dead husband’s family hadn’t been able to track the baby girl down until she was 16? T’Lal had murdered T’Laren’s biological father in the throes of _pon farr_ because she was a chooser, and she’d chosen Roger Dorset. Had T’Laren’s adoptive mother Helene even known her husband had been cheating on her with her supposed friend? Had T’Lal known she would inevitably be driven to kill her husband when she agreed to marry him? Why did she let herself choose a human man if she was already bonded? Why had she let herself go through with an act that would result in an innocent man’s death?

And what of T’Laren’s own situation now? Who had she chosen? Would she kill Q if he _did_ offer himself, the way she had just tried to kill the Ferengi? Did she need Soram, or Tris? Would she try to kill the wrong one if he approached her? But it didn’t make sense, because she’d always been told choosers picked one man and would kill any other who had or tried to have sex with them during _pon farr_, so long as their chosen one was alive. Ordinary Vulcans during _pon farr_ preferred their mate but would, if separated from a bondmate or especially if unbonded, willingly have sex with anything that moved, if it offered and sometimes if it didn’t. The Ferengi had offered her sex and she’d wanted to kill them. Wanted to break every bone in their body, rip their lobes off all the way with her teeth, smash them and tear them and rip them asunder. Last night she’d wanted to jump on Q and fuck him senseless, not kill him or break his bones. Logically that made sense, because Q was as psi-sensitive as any human and Ferengi were psi-null, but everything she’d read said that logic had absolutely nothing to do with one’s reactions during _pon farr._ She wanted Q. Still wanted him, badly – even more so now that she was part-stunned and shaking in reaction to her own violence and the inadequate phaser stun. Wanted to kiss him, touch him, feel him, wrap her fingers around his cock and feel it harden, watch his face when he lost himself in pleasure. Make him writhe and cry out, make him shove it into her and hammer her until she melted. She hadn’t wanted the Ferengi, at all, and in fact had wanted to kill them for wanting _her._

If she was a chooser, then she’d chosen Q. Which was horribly wrong, and stupid, illogical, every nonsensical thing ever. He was a former patient, and even if he’d fired her he was still very vulnerable to her. He was a virgin. He had enormous hang-ups about sex. He had even more enormous hang-ups, and outright phobias, of telepathic intrusion. He had _been_ telepathically raped, by his own kind when he’d been supposed to be invulnerable and by tr’Sahlassiu recently. He was, despite brief moments of being wonderfully heroic in his own way, a self-centered asshole who would be a very poor choice for a boyfriend. He was the last person she should have chosen. Except that, as nearly as she could tell, she had chosen him, against all logic because _pon farr_ didn’t operate on logic, and now she was stuck. Even if they were rescued tomorrow she would still want him.

Was it possible for a chooser to want more than one man? She imagined Tris here, offering himself, and felt no urge to violence. She imagined Soram. No, him she still wanted to kill, again. Soram had betrayed her; Tris never had. She still loved him. He would be safe to turn to, if they were rescued tomorrow, which they probably wouldn’t be because if _Yamato_ had had the slightest inclination they were in trouble then _Ketaya_ would never have been allowed to launch. But Tris wasn’t here, and Q was, and oh how she wanted to please him, caress him, feel him inside and _fuck_ him—

No. No. She was too far gone; she couldn’t be thinking this way. She couldn’t _want_ this. She _had_ to overcome it, had to get her self control back. Or lock herself away where she couldn’t hurt Q. She would not rape him. She wasn’t an animal, she was Vulcan. She would get control, or die.

Quite possibly die. But better that than to harm an innocent man who considered her his only friend in the universe.

* * *

Today working with the Ferengi was sheer torture. Not quite as literal a torture as he'd endured yesterday, but Q had already pushed that experience into the small black box he kept things like the attack by the Ceulan assassin or the beating from Starfleet. It wasn't that he had forgotten any of those things-- if he had reason to, he could remember any of the various horrible things that had happened to him as a human in terrifying clarity-- but he simply couldn't function on a daily basis if he couldn't push those memories out of his head most of the time. Being bored, humiliated and having to struggle to make himself understood to morons while not being permitted to treat them as the morons they were, however, was pretty much the story of his entire life on Starbase 56, which made it largely impossible to push _those_ experiences into a black box. And this was the worst it had ever been. It was one thing not to be permitted to refuse to teach someone, but permitted to tell them in excruciating detail how stupid they were. It was another thing entirely to have to choke back every insulting thing he wanted to say, swallow his pride when they insulted _him_, and be forced to try to hide his frustration almost completely, out of fear of what they’d do to him if he did so much as roll his eyes at them.

When they decided to run a test, he told them the drive wasn’t ready, that there was a good chance the crystals would blow. And they ignored him. And he didn’t push. If he’d been back in the Federation, if it was still yesterday and Yalit hadn’t beaten him with a neurowhip yet, he would have pushed it – would have pointed out what morons they were being, insulted their lineage and their level of evolution, and his voice would have dripped with contempt as he explained everything that was wrong with their ideas. But he didn’t know how to argue for the truth _without_ insulting people, and he was afraid. When the crystals blew, then they’d know he was telling the truth and maybe next time they’d listen to him.

So they fired up the transwarp drive, despite Q's advice, and for the first several minutes, it looked as if the test would be successful. Q knew better, but there was nothing he could do except brace for the inevitable stop. Yalit laughed at him. "Oh, we're so doomed. We can't possibly run a working test of the drive! Do you really even know anything, or are you actually completely overrated?"

He swallowed everything he wanted to say in response, and simply mumbled, "Maybe you'll get lucky."

Of course, ten minutes after the test began, the crystals blew and the power went out.

For several minutes there was nothing but chaos. Q stood to one side, arms folded, resentful that he had to be trapped here in the dark as the Ferengi scurried around madly, trying to get their power restored. They were using the lights on their hand scanners, which actually provided almost no light but it was better than total darkness, in a pathetic attempt to illuminate the room enough that they could accomplish something, or at least figure out that they couldn’t accomplish anything. He wished there was a way he could contact T'Laren, but he couldn't, and she probably wouldn't try to take advantage of the power failure without him.

“We’ve shattered three crystals! We only had two replacements!”

“There’s no emergency power! We don’t even have life support!”

“The _Profit Margin_ was pacing us until we hit transwarp, but at warp-equivalent 13 they’re going to be half a day behind us. We can’t expect any assistance!”

And then Yalit was in his personal space, holding the neurowhip coiled in her hand for light. At least he hoped it was on for light. He took an involuntary step back against the wall. “Do you think this is funny?” she snarled at him.

Where was she even getting that? He didn’t think this was funny at all, just incredibly irritating. “No, of course not,” he snapped, before he remembered that he was supposed to speak to her deferentially.

“I think you do! Lie to us, give us misinformation, and watch us stumbling around in the dark when the power blows out. You must be happy with what you’ve done. Maybe you need another lesson?” She brandished the whip at him.

All the blood rushed out of Q’s face. “No!” he gasped, pressing back further against the wall. “I warned you about the crystals! I said they might blow, and you didn’t listen to me! You can’t blame me for your failure when I tried to warn you—”

“Oh, yes, mention casually ‘that will probably blow the crystals’, like you’re talking about the rain! That was so very helpful. I remember what you did when you thought things wouldn’t work at the conference. You barely opened your mouth this time!”

“Because I was afraid you’d hit me if I insisted you were wrong!”

“Well, now I’m going to hit you because you didn’t make it clear what the problem was. Is that any better?”

There was nowhere to go. He was backed up all the way against the wall, and while Yalit was barely half his size, even if he shoved her and ran before she hit him, her goons would easily catch him – engineering was too crowded, too dark, and the doors wouldn’t open. “Please, no! I – I can fix it. Let me help you get the power back on line!”

“How are you going to do that? We haven’t _got_ three spare crystals!”

“There’s extra crystals in the locker under the main engineering console. I put some in there the night before we left _Yamato_, when we were prepping for departure and loading our bags, because I knew about the issue with the crystals blowing under transwarp.”

“Boys!” Yalit shouted, and the panicked chatter going on all throughout the room instantly stopped. “Check under the main engineering console. Q here says there’s extra dilithium crystals in a locker there.” She looked up at him, the light from the neurowhip throwing eerie shadows across her face. “And you’d better be telling the truth, or I’ll whip you until you’ll lick my toes to make it stop.”

That really wouldn’t take very long, Q thought, terrified. He’d do _anything_, no matter how disgusting or humiliating, to keep her from starting, let alone to make her stop. It horrified him that he was this weak, but the box he’d put his memory of the pain from yesterday in had broken open and leaked all over his brain the moment she’d threatened him with the whip again, and he couldn’t stop remembering how much it had hurt, how broken and humiliated he’d felt to be lying crumpled at her feet sobbing for mercy. His back ached with shadow pain, the memory of his agony translating into some degree of literal pain now. “I’m not lying,” he said desperately. “Go ahead and check it!”

“Grandmother, I can’t get it open! There’s no power!”

“The emergency release for the locker is right under the lip of the console,” Q said quickly, his words almost tripping on themselves.

“Okay, that’s done it. Yes! Grandmother, there are ten crystals in here!”

“_Ten_?” She looked up at Q again. “What, did you steal them from Starfleet?”

“I requisitioned them!” Q snapped hotly. “I didn’t _need_ to steal them. My safety and security’s important enough to the Federation that they just gave me ten dilithium crystals because I asked.”

“Well, if they’d just _give_ you something worth three or four bars of gold-pressed latinum because you _asked_, that bodes well for how much they’ll pay to get you back safely.” She nodded in satisfaction. “Keep our extra crystals! Hook up three of his ten; the Federation uses the highest grade dilithium, so his will probably last better than our discount crystals.”

“But Grandmother, if we use the discount crystals plus _one_ of his ten, we get to save the better crystals, and maybe we could sell them for a profit!”

“Don’t be an idiot, Lurm. We make much more from transwarp than we do from dilithium crystals. Being able to run the tests successfully is more important.”

The Ferengi installed the crystals, with much jostling each other in the dark and demanding light from each other. Then one of them – apparently Yalit’s second in engineering, he had been one of the two who’d helped her torture Q yesterday – said, “There’s a problem, Mother. The system’s completely shut down. We’ll have to do a cold start.”

“So do an emergency intermix, Gon.”

“We _can’t_ without computers. The calculations are so complicated we’d blow up the ship. But if we do it the normal way, a cold start could take a day, maybe more, and we won’t have power until the engine’s back on line.”

“We’ll survive for a day without life support. The air volume aboard this ship’s enough that we could survive three days or more. There’s only twenty of us aboard right now, plus Q and his Vulcan, and the ship’s almost as big as _Profit Margin_.” She shakes her head. “We’ll be out of water faster than that, but in half a day _Profit Margin_ should catch up with us, and they can beam all but a few guards for the prisoners and a skeleton crew for engineering out of here, and beam those that stay behind over some water and food. Maybe extra oxygen. So we’ll live. Start the process.” She took a deep breath, and then turned back to Q, her face suddenly distorting with rage. “But _you!_ It’s your fault we have to be stuck in the dark, without air circulation or warmth or even _water_, for half a day! I should beat you until you forget your name!”

“I can get the intermix formula right,” Q babbled, almost hysterical with terror. “Please, please don’t hurt me. If you leave me free to concentrate I can get you the formula for the emergency intermix and you can be back up in less than an hour. Please.”

Her scowl grew even more fierce. “And how in the name of the River do you think you can do that without computer assistance?”

“It’s math. The day I need computer assistance to do math is the day I jump out an airlock.”

“There’s no way a person can do that kind of math,” Gon said. “There’s something like twenty different calculations you need to do, in sequence.”

“Actually, it’s between seven and twenty-three,” Q said, “and some of them iterate up to ten times before you have your final answer, and how many separate calculations you have to do depends on the results of the ones you’ve already done. So yes, I’m aware that most mortals can’t manage this without computer assistance. But I’ve been doing math for _millions of years_. I can perform the calculations in my head.”

“And if you’re wrong the ship blows up,” Yalit snapped.

“I won’t be wrong.”

Q’s brain was optimized for doing math – an ability like a savant’s, although without the deficits that would typically come with that. It wasn’t a side effect of being a Q – he’d actually chosen this as his standard humanoid form in the first place because, among other things like his general aesthetic appreciation of the form, the man who’d had it first, a human physicist named Jason Hartfeil who’d died over a century ago, had that talent, and being able to offload much of the math involved in any use of his Q powers onto the mortal brain he was using rather than having to send all of it to the part of his self still within the Continuum had increased the speed with which he could make things happen – at least to his perceptions, although a human would never have noticed a difference of a tenth of a picosecond. When the Continuum had locked him into this body, he had not only acquired its annoying deficits like its bad back, but its positive traits as well, and that, fortunately, included the trait he’d acquired the body _for._

The end result, aside from the fact that an elderly Vulcan physicist had once mistaken him for Hartfeil’s grandson, was that Q didn’t have to think to do math. His brain just _did_ it for him, leaving his mind free to think about the implications of the results he was getting. Q wasn’t up there with an actual computer, or, say, Data, but he was as adept with pure computation as a highly intelligent Vulcan who, unlike T’Laren, had actually been fully trained in the disciplines. He pointed that out. “I’m as capable of performing advanced computation in my head as a Vulcan. It won’t go as fast as it would have with computer assistance – for this number of calculations, it’ll take even me half an hour to an hour – but it’ll be as accurate. You can run your emergency intermix in an hour. The air won’t even have a chance to dry out.”

Her scowl, which had been evening out as he spoke, returned full force. “How stupid do you think I am? I know what you’re trying to do here!” She lifted the whip.

Q threw his hands out in front of his body, trying to block her from being able to hit his torso or groin. “I’m telling the truth! Please! The only thing I’m ‘trying’ to do here is keep you from hurting me! I don’t have any other agenda, I promise!”

“Oh, so it didn’t even occur to you that if you persuaded me to let you calculate the intermix formula, you could use it to _blow us all up?_” She grabbed his shirt collar and dragged him down, forcing him to bend down where she could get in his face. “You’ve threatened to kill yourself again and again, and we both know now it was a crock, after you begged your Vulcan friend to break your neck last night. You can’t kill yourself with your mind. But if I let you calculate an intermix formula, you could kill us _all_, including yourself.”

“If I did that T’Laren would die too.”

“You’re not even _fucking_ her. I’m supposed to think you care so goddamn much about a woman you won’t even screw that you’d pass up a chance to kill me and my family and yourself?”

Despite his fear, Q could not keep the look of utter disgust off his face. “Just because you come from a society where men consider you utterly worthless except as a receptacle for their genitals, doesn’t mean all mortal men have the same nauseating attitudes. I don’t _need_ to be engaged in sordid copulatory practices with a woman to value her life.”

Yalit released him, allowing Q to stand up straight again. “Oh, is that the way you are, then?” she sneered. “You’re one of those that doesn’t even _like_ women, aren’t you? Rather have some big strong fellow do you up the ass?”

Q blinked at the non sequitur, then scowled. “I am not _human_, if you’ll recall. I haven’t the slightest interest in any permutation of mortal sexuality; once you’ve enjoyed the sublime pleasure of joining energies, the idea of inserting tab A into slot B seems about as entertaining as cutting your toenails. But if I _did_ have such an interest, I can’t see why the gender of my partner would concern me; once you’ve made the decision to commit bestiality, does it really matter whether the animal you’re copulating with is male or female?”

“Wait, so you think fucking another human – or your Vulcan pal, or anyone else – is _bestiality?_ And you expect me to think that you care so much about the life of an animal that you’ll sacrifice what you want to save its life?”

He sighed. “I don’t think T’Laren is an animal.” _You, on the other hand, absolutely qualify_. “But she’s not my species. Not the way you humanoids aren’t each other’s species; she’s not even my _form_ of life. You could be great friends with a sentient tree and still not want to have sex with it. T’Laren is my friend. And you’re absolutely right, if it were only me in this situation I would be willing to blow us all to bits in a heartbeat. But I won’t do anything to harm T’Laren, or allow her to come to harm if it’s in my power to stop. And you _know_ this, because you’ve been using it against me since you took me captive, so why put on an elaborate show of ignorance?” It worried him, having to admit so baldly that T’Laren was his weakness, but if he didn’t convince her to let him calculate the intermix formula, she would almost certainly take out her frustration at the lack of power on him _sometime_ today before they got the engines back on, since apparently she’d rather blame him for her failure than her own idiocy. And it was true that Yalit and the Ferengi had been using T’Laren against him since their capture, so really, was he admitting anything they didn’t already know?

She was quiet for a moment. “Let me see if I understand you correctly,” she said finally. “You consider sex with mortal humanoids disgusting, equivalent to having sex with an animal. You have _no_ desire for that Vulcan woman at all. But she’s your only friend in the universe, since your nasty attitude has driven off anyone who wasn’t paid to be your friend, so you’ll do anything to keep her alive and healthy and unhurt. And that’s why I’m supposed to trust that you won’t blow us all up. Right?”

“I could quibble at individual details, but you have the big picture more or less correct,” Q said.

And then Yalit smiled.

It was a “gotcha” smile, and Q cringed. In the unholy glow of the neurowhip, her huge, toothy grin was monstrous, terrifying, because it looked exactly as if she thought she’d just tricked him into saying something that betrayed himself, or something she could use against him. But she didn’t hit him. “Fine,” she said, still with the huge evil grin. “You make us an intermix formula. But you write down your steps – I’ll give you a self-powered slate to write on – and I’ll check your work. Don’t forget I caught that you were lying to me yesterday. If you lie to me again, and I catch it, I’ll tear strips off your back with this—“ she waved the neurowhip in his face – “and I’ll have my boys tie your _friend_ down and fuck her till she bleeds, and I’ll make you watch. And if you lie to me and I don’t catch it, or if you screw up, you’ll blow your dear friend to pieces.”

Her grin got bigger. “I’ll even give you an extra incentive. Succeed here, and I promise the Vulcan will go back to the Federation once I’m done selling you, maybe even before I’m done now that I know you can’t really kill yourself. The Romulan Neutral Zone is too far away just to sell off a whore, and no one else would buy a Vulcan for that… and she’s disrupting my boys’ concentration. They don’t normally have women aboard they can’t fuck, aside from me. So I’ll dump her at my first opportunity, drop her off on a Federation world and let her get on with her life.” Yalit pulled his shirt again, dragging his face down to her level. “You understand? She’ll live and go free, just as long as _you_ don’t do anything that kills her.”

Q’s first reaction was surprise, and disbelief – why would Yalit make him any promises of carrots, when they both knew she had him completely cowed by her stick? And then he realized why she was promising him T’Laren’s freedom – T’Laren’s continued life became much more valuable if she would go free back to the Federation than if she were sold to the Romulans as a breeding slave. By promising him T’Laren’s freedom she gave him a much more powerful incentive _not_ to blow them all up; he might have convinced himself that killing T’Laren in a quick clean explosion was a kinder fate to grant her than to let her be sold to the Romulans, but if the alternative was her freedom instead, it would be impossible for him to justify killing her. And with working transwarp, Yalit would probably feel that the risk of T’Laren successfully getting Federation law enforcement to capture _Ketaya_ and rescue Q was extremely low, so she could afford to release T’Laren.

Which would leave Q completely alone, even more helpless than he was now, but he refused to think about that. He had promised to get T’Laren out of this situation, and if Yalit would promise her freedom to him for something he was going to do anyway so she wouldn’t whip him… now he was committed. He couldn’t change his mind and decide to blow them all up anyway. He _had_ to do all he could to save T’Laren, which definitely included not killing her himself.

“All right. Give me the slate you want me to show my work on, and a light.”

“We don’t have any light.”

“I can do the calculations in the dark, but I can’t write them down without light. And you couldn’t read them without light. So if you want to check my work, you’re going to need to get me a light.”

“Sed. Go to my office and get the slate off my desk. Frej, Pag, bring your scanner lights over here and leave them with Q. He’s going to calculate our intermix formula so we can do an emergency cold start.”

Since Q remembered what the matter and antimatter levels had been before the power blew, he could begin the calculations right away. When the slate arrived, he wrote down the matter and antimatter levels, the rating of the dilithium crystals, and the equation for balancing them all together, and then wrote down the answer. He then wrote down the next equation, describing the density of space-time in this area and the relative amount of energy that would thus be required to make a subspace bubble, plugged in the number from the last equation and wrote down the answer.

“You’re not showing your work,” Yalit snapped.

“I can’t. I do the calculations in my head – I’m not carrying the three and shifting the decimal point the way you’d do it. I just _know_ the answer. I’m writing down all the calculations and all the intermediate results I’m getting, but that _is_ all the work I’m doing.”

“And how do you expect me to follow that without a calculator?”

“I don’t. That’s why I’m doing this and not you, remember?”

“If I think you’re deliberately fudging your answers…” she said menacingly.

Q took a deep breath. “You promised me T’Laren’s freedom. I won’t jeopardize that. About the only thing that could go wrong is if you keep waving that thing in my face and disrupting my concentration; I don’t know about Ferengi, but one _sure_ way to make even superintelligent human beings a whole lot stupider is to terrorize them and make them spend all their mental energy on trying to appease you instead of trying to solve your problem.”

Yalit hissed at him, but backed off. With her no longer pressed up against him, looking over his shoulder, he was much better able to concentrate – the math only solved itself when his mind was relatively calm. He’d worked through horrific headaches, the fear of impending Borg invasion, two hours of sleep in thirty-six, and the belief that Security would kill him any minute now, but there were limits, and a neurowhip being waved in his face after he was just tortured with one yesterday went beyond them. Q worked steadily, although to the Ferengi it probably looked like several minutes of doing nothing followed by frantically writing numbers down; most of the work he was doing, including the iterations he had to perform on some of the calculations, was in his head.

For a moment before he wrote down the final numbers, he hesitated. According to T’Laren herself, she had been dead before Lhoviri had resurrected her to be his therapist. So if he was going to die, would it be such a great deal if she died at the same time? It really would be so much easier if he could just write the intermix formula down wrong, and die in a clean, instantaneous burst of energy, and it would be deeply satisfying to know he was taking his tormentors with him. Living with the terror of what Yalit might do, who she would sell him to, not to mention how willing she seemed to be to use the neurowhip on him, had been horrible so far. A quick death was much more appealing. Surely T’Laren would understand…

Except that she wouldn’t. Because she’d never have a chance to. He had no time to ask her, to warn her or explain the situation; if she died now it would take her completely by surprise, and she’d have no idea why she was dying, or that it was his fault, and he couldn’t do that to her. Not if the Ferengi really were going to let her go. She could go back to her life in Starfleet, or back to her boyfriend and sister-in-law on _Yamato_, and rebuild, her obligation to Lhoviri discharged unless he took it on himself to rescue Q personally and reunite them, and Q considered it rather more likely that Lhoviri would spontaneously make pigs fly on the bridge of _Ketaya_ than directly intervene to save him. The thought of facing his captivity without her, of facing Yalit and the weapons she wielded against him, was awful… but if T’Laren was set free, then the Ferengi wouldn’t be able to rape her or kill her or do anything to her. It would just be them and Q, no collateral damage, no innocent people to suffer for any mistakes he might make. As awful as he found the prospect of facing his captivity and eventual fate alone, the idea that T’Laren might be made to suffer for his actions was much, much worse. And if she could be set free, then he couldn’t kill her, no matter how much he wanted to die right now.

Besides, he really didn’t believe Lhoviri had been telling her the truth about revising the universe for her. Which meant it was quite possible that she’d never actually been dead.

He wrote down the correct formula. “Here. Use this ratio and this timing, and you should have the engines back online within fifteen minutes.”

“You’d better be right,” Yalit snarled.

“I’m always right,” Q said tiredly, suddenly exhausted. He’d been so afraid today, for so long, he was completely worn out. The lack of food wasn’t helping, probably.

When the power came back on, the Ferengi whooped and danced around the warp core. Yalit acknowledged him with a nod. “Well. You were telling the truth after all. Will wonders never cease?”

And then it was back to work, back to trying to design modifications for the warp engine so that transwarp wouldn’t destroy the crystals again.

* * *

By the time he was allowed to return to his room, he was desperate to do so. There had been no shortage of coffee, or water, which he’d drunk enough of to counteract the diuretic effects of the coffee and avoid getting a headache. But there hadn’t been any food, since he didn’t consider bowls of grubworms to be food. He hadn’t eaten anything substantial since breakfast yesterday, and by now he was genuinely extremely hungry. He didn’t voluntarily go without food for this long, ordinarily. All the coffee and no food had made him slightly hyper, but hollow, shaking. And the emotional stress of the day wasn’t helping.

He wanted to talk to T’Laren, but she was doing more of her endless exercising, not looking at him. “Have you been doing that all day?” he asked disbelievingly. “I realize it must be horrifically boring to be stuck in this room by yourself all day, but surely there’s _something_ you could be doing that doesn’t involve kicking phantoms in the throat?”

She said nothing. She didn’t even look at him. “Yoo-hoo, _Ketaya_ to T’Laren. Come in, T’Laren.”

She was still ignoring him. What the hell? “Fine,” he said, genuinely upset. “Be that way. I don’t need you.”

He watched her for a minute. She might as well be a zombie. Her concentration seemed to be completely fixed on the exercise she was doing, which appeared to involve pretending to kill Ferengi – at least the kicks and punches she was delivering were much more in line with where the Ferengi vulnerable points would be than where his would be. And then Q noticed that her knuckles were green. And even worse, there were green spots on the wall. She was hitting the wall hard enough to split her own skin and bleed all over everything. Quite aside from how unsanitary that was, he was worried for her. What was wrong with her, that she had to exercise so hard as to cause herself physical damage, and she couldn’t even talk to him?

“Yo, T’Laren.” He got up off the couch and walked over to her, reaching out for her. “Is there a reason—”

He never got to finish the sentence. As he came up to her and put a friendly hand on her shoulder, she stiffened under his touch, her head falling back and her back arching slightly. And then she spun to face him, and shoved him, so hard he went flying across the room. “Don’t touch me!”

Q landed hard on the carpet, winded, stunned and utterly betrayed. T’Laren had no expression on her face, her eyes glazed, her fists clenched against her chest. “I kept us alive for you!” Q shouted, as soon as he had the ability to speak. “I could have destroyed us all with the cold intermix formula, but I couldn’t kill you!”

She looked down at him and took a step backward. Her eyes focused, staring at him. “Lock me away,” she said hoarsely, sounding as if she hadn’t actually spoken in a week. “I will not _harm_ you… Lock me away.”

“Gladly.” He stormed over to his closet. It was a little late for her to not harm him, wasn’t it? He was going to have bruises on his buttocks and back from that. Her demand that he lock her up made him feel a tiny bit better in some senses – it had to be the drugs doing this to her. Surely if T’Laren were in control of herself, she wouldn’t have shoved him across the room. But he was even more terrified now, if less betrayed. He knew T’Laren had killed someone she loved in the midst of an emotional maelstrom before, or at least she believed she had. If T’Laren was willing to throw him across the room, what else might she do? No, he’d happily lock her up. He threw everything out of the walk-in closet, as rapidly as he could.

He filled a couple of vases, with no flowers in them, with water from the bathroom and put them in the closet. Then he found a large brass urn in amidst his unpacked boxes of antiques, and put that in there, his face twisting in a bitter smile. He was offering T’Laren a priceless, thousand-year-old antique for a chamberpot. But he wasn’t willing to make her piddle on the carpet in there, after all.

She watched his preparations from her position against the wall, her eyes flickering back and forth as she followed his motions. She said nothing, and Q didn’t try to say anything to her. What could he say, after all? She was obviously completely non-rational.

When his preparations were complete, he backed away from the closet. “How am I supposed to feed you when the Ferengi bring dinner?” he asked.

“I will not eat,” she said, still hoarse.

“That doesn’t sound very smart. How about we figure out some way to get you the food that doesn’t involve you violently assaulting me?”

T’Laren shook her head rapidly. “I mean I cannot eat. Until… until this is past… I will not feel hunger, or be able to keep food down.”

“Oh. Well, I guess that simplifies things. You want to get in there now?” He motioned at the closet.

She didn’t look at him. She turned her head to focus on the closet, and she walked to it and knelt down on the floor inside, still not looking at him.

“How long do I need to keep you in there?” Q asked.

She was silent for a moment. He was about to repeat the question when she said, “In… three days… I should no longer be a danger to you.”

“Okay. Three days it is, then.” He went back to the closet and hit the button to shut the door. The closet didn’t have a button to open it on the other side; if there was voice control a person could ask the computer to open the door if they accidentally got stuck in the closet, but without voice control only the buttons would allow the closet door to open or shut.

As soon as the door was shut, T’Laren started moaning. Q had never heard her make any sound like it – she sounded like she was in agony. Did she need medical attention? Could he even _get_ medical attention for her? She seemed to think she needed to be locked up so she wouldn’t hurt him; was her body in so much pain that she would react with violence to even a slight touch? Maybe Yalit had hit _her_ with the neurowhip, or someone else had while he was gone?

He swallowed hard. She might have been raped. She might have been tortured, beaten, whipped with the neurowhip, held down and violated by half a dozen Ferengi, and he had no way to know. And at this point, no way to ask her. Well, maybe he could just go up to the closet and ask her, but her moans were so loud he wasn’t sure she’d be able to hear him, and besides she’d ignored almost everything he’d said since he came home. If something terrible had been done to her while he was gone, she obviously wasn’t willing to talk about it.

While he was standing there, staring at the door to the closet and frantically trying to decide what he should do, the door opened and a Ferengi entered with a bowl. “Dinnertime, human! Hope you’re hungry!”

With a sinking feeling, Q walked over to the bowl, fairly sure of what he’d see, and he wasn’t disappointed. Grubworms. He took the bowl from the Ferengi and set it down on the coffee table. “Let me explain something to you,” he said, too tired for outrage or anything other than a falsely conversational tone. “I haven’t eaten anything since yesterday morning. Your matriarch, your grandma, whatever she is to you, wants me to use my mind, in very complex ways that really do require a steady supply of fuel. But I am not going to eat grubworms.” He put the lid back on the bowl and turned away from it. “Now, you may think to yourself that I can be forced to eat grubworms, and you’d be correct. I’m sure you know by now that Yalit has me over a barrel and can force me to do anything at this point. But see, the last time you people made me eat insects, I threw up. And the last time Yalit used the neurowhip on me, I threw up. So I’m inclined to think that if you torture me to force me to eat the grubworms, I might actually _eat_ them but I’ll never keep them down. And if I throw up everything I eat, I will _still_ have no fuel for my brain.” By now he was standing over the Ferengi, glaring down at him. “So why don’t you get me some decent food, that I _can_ eat, or you can explain to grandma why I keep passing out when she’s trying to get me to build her a transwarp engine that works.”

“The Lady Yalit says it’s fine to feed you grubworms.”

“The Lady Yalit will figure out that it really wasn’t fine after all when I keel over and lose consciousness sometime tomorrow morning. I cannot go without food indefinitely and still use my mind, and I won’t eat grubworms. And I won’t be able to keep myself from upchucking them if I do. So how about you get me food I won’t immediately vomit back up.”

The Ferengi scowled and left the room. Q collapsed on the couch. “Well, I guess we’ll see if I’m going to starve to death, or be kept alive long enough to betray every principle I have and be condemned to mortality forever,” he muttered.

The sounds T’Laren was making were disturbing him badly. If he didn’t know better, he’d almost think they sounded like pleasure. Not that he was exactly an expert on the sounds mortals made when experiencing pleasure – as a Q he’d really had very little interest in mortal reproductive activities, and as a human the only sounds of pleasure he’d had opportunity to hear were the ones he couldn’t stop himself from making when he was driven to masturbate – but he _was_ an expert on cries of pain, having heard a lot more of those from a greater variety of people than just himself while he was human, and this… sounded just a bit more like pleasure than pain. Which didn’t make any sense and he was probably making a mistake, but it was bothering him immensely because he didn’t know whether to be horrified for his friend’s pain or nauseated, and every so often something would sound so much like a moan of pleasure that it would send shocks through his groin, making his own body stir in wholly unwanted ways, and then he’d remember that in fact the sound probably meant T’Laren was in agony and he’d feel completely disgusted with himself. She’d said the dicydrenaline lowered her emotional control and in essence was making her drunk, but it seemed too far a shift between violently exercising, shoving him, and then – what, masturbating? Exactly _how_ could those sounds mean pleasure, anyway? No, they were probably cries of pain and he was a thoroughly disgusting person for finding any of them even slightly arousing, even involuntarily.

Her moans turned into cries and crescendoed in a series of short, sharp shrieks. And then she was silent. And then she started crying. Q almost went to the door to let her out then, overwhelmed by the need to do something, anything to help her, but what the hell could he do? If she was in terrible physical pain, _he_ couldn’t do anything for her – he didn’t know how to do so much as a backrub, and if she’d been tortured that probably wouldn’t be helpful anyway. If something awful and traumatic had happened to her, what could he do? What could he say? He was abrasive, selfish, completely unempathic – he didn’t know what to say to give comfort, what to do, and T’Laren had already told him she thought he’d probably be inept at it and she didn’t want to turn to him with her problems, back when they’d argued because she’d talked to Tris about her feelings when tr’Sahlassiu had attacked them both. If she’d wanted his help, she would have asked for it, wouldn’t she have?

Besides, if she thought she needed to be locked away to keep from hurting him, maybe it wasn’t a good idea to let her out.

The door opened again, and a different Ferengi came in with a tray. This time it was spaghetti with meatballs, again. Q disliked eating the same food in the same week unless he was so depressed that absolutely nothing tasted good and he was choosing food solely for its blandness and inoffensiveness, and he wasn’t in that situation now… but it didn’t matter. He was starving. He’d eat spaghetti with meatballs every night this week if they’d just feed that to him instead of grubworms; he may have been in the habit, for the past two years or so, of eating only one meal a day, but T’Laren had gotten him used to more food than that, so being forced to skip lunch, dinner, breakfast and lunch again had actually _hurt._ Q retreated into the bedroom with the spaghetti so that he wouldn’t have to hear T’Laren crying. Nothing could spoil his appetite right now, but he felt too guilty eating instead of doing whatever unspecified thing he should be doing for her when he could hear her.

Only, after his food was gone, he had nothing else to do. He couldn’t read any of his books – technically he’d never read most of them, they were antiques and generally chosen for aesthetic and historical value, but when he’d been a Q researching humanity he had consumed the entire Terran canon of great literature, and all the physical books he owned were in that category. And his memory for what he’d read was too good to get any pleasure out of re-reading anything. But what was he supposed to do? He was in the same position he’d been in every time Anderson had cut off his computer access – without the computer he couldn’t pull up new books, couldn’t listen to music, couldn’t read news or watch flat recordings or play computer games or investigate current research or troll Terran civilian anonytext forums on controversial subjects to stir up arguments or _anything_. As long as T’Laren had been here, he’d had the opportunity to talk to her or play chess with her, and that had given him enough mental stimulation that he hadn’t missed the computer access that much… but now he didn’t have her to talk to, and he was left with literally nothing to do but brood on his situation and worry about T’Laren.

He thought he heard screaming. Quickly he went out into the common room where he was closer to the closet and could hear T’Laren better. And he immediately thought better of it and went back into his bedroom. She was screaming obscenities – he would be impressed under other circumstances; he hadn’t even known T’Laren _knew_ all those words. When they’d been aboard _Yamato_ together and he’d seen chinks in her perfect Vulcan armor, evidence of her somewhat sordid personal life, he’d been amused and delighted… but this was too much vulnerability, too much exposure. He was deeply embarrassed for her, and the only thing he could think to do was to remove himself from the situation so she wouldn’t have to deal with knowing that he’d seen and heard every out of control thing she did, once this was over.

What did she mean by three days, anyway? Was it going to take _that_ long for the drug to leave her system, when she was fasting? Or had they done something else to her?

This was getting him nowhere. His stomach clenched with so much tension that he was afraid he might throw up anyway, he couldn’t sit still, and he was still absolutely bored, unable to stop obsessing over T’Laren’s problems because he had nothing else he could do. He _had_ to find something to distract himself.

The self-powered slate from earlier today gave him an idea. Q had an antique fountain pen, an ink bottle, and a pad of parchment, for absolutely no good reason except that some antiques dealer had been using them to add period flair to her receipts, and Q had demanded that she sell him a set too. He had never used them for anything; he’d always thought that if he ever wanted to send a letter to Picard, he’d use the archaic paper and pen rather than a recording because Picard would appreciate the gesture, except now Picard was dead and the letter Q had been putting off writing to him for three years would never be written. The Continuum would be horrified at him doing this, the Federation might well put him on trial for giving the Ferengi secrets he wouldn’t give _them_, but if Yalit was going to blame him and threaten to whip him every time something went wrong, he needed to make sure nothing ever went wrong again. And that meant figuring out, on his own, how to redesign the Thetaran transwarp drive so it could run on dilithium crystals, or some alternate fuel that everyone in the Alpha Quadrant had easy access to.

Because transwarp was far too great an advance to give the primitive peoples of the Alpha Quadrant, including his hosts, Q had never worked on it or dug too deeply into how he would go about creating a transwarp drive; it wasn’t his job to invent new technology, it was his job to give Starfleet engineers ideas that _they_ could implement in inventing new technology. He was, mostly, supposed to be doing pure science, not applied theory. But it was, most assuredly, part of his job description to find problems with other people’s implementations, and offer solutions. He couldn’t have built a transwarp drive from scratch, not without a month or two to work on the problem, but with a Thetaran drive in front of him he could identify the problems with _it_ and figure out how to fix them.

So. He had a drive that required six-dimensional helical crystals, and he didn’t have any. What he had was dilithium, which were four-dimensional transverse helices, and he couldn’t teach anyone in this part of space how to manufacture six-dim crystals without giving them even more vastly disruptive scientific advances than transwarp itself. Technologies that existed around here included the quantum singularities that the Romulans used to power their warp drives, but while he understood the principle behind that perfectly well he didn’t have the faintest idea how the Romulans actually implemented the fiddly engineering details. There were other substances around that had similar properties to dilithium – trilithium, which would almost work except that it was extremely unstable and would probably blow up _without_ a transwarp field; quadronium, which would be great except that it was highly radioactive; seletherium, which could handle the transwarp stresses well but was mostly only found in the Delta Quadrant, and which the Borg went out of their way to monopolize. None of them seemed quite feasible to use instead. But if he was stuck with the dilithium, what could he do to keep the transwarp field stable and keep the crystals from blowing?

For hours, Q wrote notes to himself and drew schematics. The schematics, of course, had numerous portions randomly rotated, with notation in the Vizoran mathematical system describing the angle and direction of rotation – something the Ferengi were never likely to figure out, as not only did Vizoran math use base 12 and have a system of 432 degrees to describe angles instead of 360, but their numbers looked like doodles of cute fuzzy alien animals. (They _were_ actually doodles of cute fuzzy alien animals. Q no longer remembered _why_ the Vizoran number 1 looked like a meerkat with tentacles or why 2 looked something like a lemur, but he did remember that for some reason the Vizorans had assigned all of their digits to stylized sketches of their most common pet creatures.) With the random rotations there was no way that anyone but him could possibly use the schematics safely to build anything. The notes couldn’t be disguised so easily, since Q no longer remembered any non-Terran alphabet well enough to write in it, but he did randomly shift between Roman, Cyrillic and Arabic writing systems, and since the Arabic was written backwards that would add some additional confusion. Any human analyst could easily enough decipher the notes, but the Universal Translator didn’t handle writing nearly as well as it handled speech and the only Terran writing system found commonly off of Earth was the Roman alphabet, so likely the Ferengi would never have seen either Cyrillic or Arabic.

By morning, his eyes were burning and his limbs felt leaden, but he had made substantial progress toward redesigning the entire transwarp power matrix and he’d managed to temporarily ignore T’Laren’s issues and his fear for his own fate, at least for the night. He was still working when he heard the door in the main room open, either with breakfast or with his escort to engineering. Q got up and went out to the other room; he didn’t particularly want to – the work he was doing was much more engaging than having to deal with Ferengi, and he didn’t really want to stop to eat – but he couldn’t afford to have the Ferengi hanging around in the room with the closet that T’Laren was locked in. It wasn’t really locked per se – anyone on this side of the door could open it, it was just that there was no means to open it from the inside.

T’Laren was whimpering. The sound stabbed him in the heart, and twisted the knife when he realized that there were words, and the words were “please… Q… please, I need you…” He swallowed hard; he couldn’t deal with this in front of the Ferengi. “What do you want?” he asked the Ferengi harshly.

“Here’s your breakfast,” the guard said. “Eat quickly; the Lady Yalit wants to see you in engineering in half an hour.”

“Fine. This had better be edible; I spent all night doing work for her, and if I don’t get real food, that I can eat, I will most likely pass out from starvation later today.” He opened the lid of the tray. Eggs and bacon again. If all they ever fed him was eggs and bacon for breakfast, and spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, he would eventually come down with some sort of vitamin deficiency disease. But then, it was unlikely that he’d remain a captive of the Ferengi long enough for it to become a problem. “Is there coffee?”

“There’ll be coffee in engineering.”

“That’ll have to do, I suppose,” he said with bad grace. He took the food over as far as the table, waiting for the Ferengi to leave. The Ferengi didn’t.

“Is there a problem?” Q asked.

The Ferengi grinned cruelly. “Aren’t you going to do something about your friend in there? She’s begging for you.”

Another thrust to the heart. Q had to ignore it, had to pretend he didn’t care, that T’Laren’s pleas weren’t tearing him apart inside. “As I’m not a doctor, I fail to see what I could possibly do for her. Now, was there some reason you needed to continue to be here, or can I eat my breakfast in peace?”

“I know what she needs,” the Ferengi said, snickering. “You don’t need to be a _doctor_ for that.”

“Are you making some sort of sordid innuendo?” Q said. “Because the last time I checked, mortal genitalia don’t actually cure anything in other people except possibly sexual frustration, and I rather think there’s a bit more wrong with T’Laren than that.”

The Ferengi still snickered. “You don’t even know what’s wrong with her, do you?”

“Well, enlighten me then, o sadistic font of wisdom. What did you people do to her?”

“Guess.”

He could guess far too many possibilities. _Did you rape her? Did you torture her? Is she having a reaction to your drugs? Did you stun her too many times, did you hit her with your neurowhips?_ But he couldn’t actually ask any of those things, because if the answer to any of those guesses was ‘yes’, he wasn’t sure he could stop himself from trying to commit physical violence on the Ferengi, and given that the fellow had a phaser and Yalit had a neurowhip she was eager to use on him, that would probably accomplish absolutely nothing except to get him stunned and tortured, which would do T’Laren no good whatsoever, and do him even less. “I’m not interested in playing Twenty Questions with you. Tell me what you did to her, or get out of my room so I can eat.”

“I guess you can just eat your breakfast, then,” the Ferengi said, still with that malicious grin, and left the room.

As soon as he was gone, Q went to the closet door. “T’Laren? T’Laren, can you hear me?”

The response was weak, hoarse. “…Q?”

“You were asking for me. Is there anything I can do to help you?”

Nothing. “T’Laren? Can you hear me?”

“…please… I need you… please…”

“Okay. I’m going to let you out and we can figure out what I can realistically do for you, all right?”

His hand went to the button, and then she yelled, “Don’t!”

He jerked away from it, startled. “I don’t understand. Don’t what? You don’t _want_ me to let you out?”

“don’t… I will not _harm_ you… I will not…”

“If you aren’t going to harm me, then I think I should let you out.”

“not safe… my control…”

“So you think you _are_ going to harm me? Look, T’Laren, should I let you out or not? I can’t help you with a door between us.”

“…yes… please, help me… I must… I need you… please…”

“Fine. I’m going to let you out.”

“Don’t!”

He was getting very, very frustrated with this conversation. “T’Laren, do you want me to help you or don’t you?”

For several seconds there was silence. “T’Laren? Are you still there?”

“What I need… what I want… will hurt you.” She sounded almost normal, for exhausted and hoarse values of normal.

Q swallowed. “What, have you turned into a vampire or something? You need to drink the blood of the living?” No answer. Of course T’Laren hadn’t much of a sense of humor at the best of times. “If you need to commit some violence, I could let you out when the Ferengi are in the room. It doesn’t have to be _me_ you beat up.”

“no… I’ve chosen and I cannot unchoose… it must be you… I need you…” The last was a plea, heartbreakingly desperate, that almost drove him to open the door anyway. But then she said, “I will not… I will not allow myself… to harm you… so don’t let me out. Whatever I say, whatever I do, however much I beg you… ignore me. Don’t let me out.”

He closed his eyes. She was the one who’d know how much of a threat she was to him, so the only smart thing to do was to honor her wishes. But it was tearing him apart _having_ to ignore her, even though he should be very, very adept at ignoring other people’s needs… but since he’d become mortal no one had ever needed him. Well, during the battle with the Borg, yes, but no one had needed him personally. Being needed by a fellow mortal when you were mortal yourself was much more like being needed by a fellow Q when you were Q than being needed by mortals when you were Q, a condition Q had generally despised when he found it in mortals, except when he’d engineered the lack of self-sufficiency himself like when he’d used the Borg to make Picard admit to needing him. Which, come to think of it, had _also_ felt dangerously like being needed, or unneeded, by fellow Q. In the Continuum no one had needed him since Azi… and he really didn’t need to think about _that_ now.

“Can you just tell me what the _problem_ is? I mean, the night before last you were just acting like you were overtired or a little drunk or something, and then you barely talked to me in the morning, and when I came back you threw me across the room for touching your shoulder. Did the Ferengi do something to you while I was gone?”

She said something in Vulcan that the translator refused to catch. And then there was a loud thump, and another, like she was throwing herself at the closed door. “Let me _out!_” she screamed. “I need you, oh god, I need to _fuck_ you, let me out, I’ll swallow you whole, I need to _have_ you, let me _OUT_…”

Q didn’t hear the rest of it, whatever she was saying. It sounded far too much like the obscenities she’d been shouting at the Ferengi yesterday, rage-filled promises of sexual violence, or just plain violence. He didn’t know why she wanted to hurt him, but the shouting and the throwing herself at the door made it much more clear that in fact she was totally not in control of herself than her confused mishmash of pleading for him and warning him off had done. He grabbed his food and ran for the bedroom, hiding there, forcing himself to eat even though the food was tasteless and his appetite was gone, because if he wasn’t at his best in dealing with Yalit she’d torture him and so he couldn’t afford the distraction of hunger. He was breathing heavily, his hands shaking. Whatever they’d done to T’Laren had driven her insane. His only friend in the universe wanted to hurt him, and obviously was restraining herself by the thinnest, frailest remnant of control imaginable. He couldn’t imagine what was going through her head, but he was desperately grateful that she’d managed to pull enough of herself together to tell him that if she let him out she’d hurt him, that the thing she was pleading for _was_ apparently his suffering, before he’d made the mistake of opening the door.

Of course, maybe he should. Vulcans were much stronger than humans, and when their emotional control broke down, much more violent. T’Laren would probably beat him to death much, much faster than two human security guards had done, and with considerably less pain than he’d suffered from the neurowhip. But there was always the chance that she’d manage to restrain herself _after_ breaking several of his bones but before killing him, leaving him in a limbo of living agony until Yalit got around to getting him medical treatment, which, given how Yalit seemed to think he could work through any level of pain or terror, would probably be never. No, suicide-by-crazy-Vulcan wasn’t reliable enough a method of death to try it.

The door chimed. He wondered why they were bothering to chime him when usually they just walked in, and then realized that T’Laren was screaming loudly enough that he might not hear it if the door simply opened. Q grabbed his notes and walked out. The two Ferengi were paying much too much attention to the closet, and the obscene things T’Laren was yelling. She was still throwing herself at the door. “I’m leaving now!” Q shouted at the closet. “Try to get yourself under control!”

And then he left with his escort, headed for Engineering.

* * *


	6. 4b: Ketaya

Get herself under control? That was an impossibility. As soon as she heard the door shut, as soon as the maddening scent of him and the sound of his voice were gone, T’Laren collapsed to her knees in the dark closet and sobbed.

Every effort she had made to get it under control had failed. While he’d been gone yesterday, the need had grown stronger and stronger. She’d even gone to the bathroom, put on the shower to hide any sounds from the Ferengi, and masturbated… three times, and it hadn’t helped. The desire had come back each time, stronger than ever. All the calming exercises she tried, all the meditation, all the martial arts katas, were nothing to the need. Her skin was a raw nerve, longing for touch. She was burning up, and all she could think of was quenching the heat with cool, wet human flesh pressed against hers. Mindlessly, she did her exercises, because the only thing that could hold off the need at all was to lose herself in imaginary violence, use her body hard and savagely.

And then Q had come back to the room, and the urge to throw him down and fling herself on top of him, enter his mind and meld with him, set him on fire with the heat burning through her and fuck him wildly, was overwhelming. It was so powerful, so demanding a need that she had to ignore him completely, didn’t dare even so much as speak to him. Of course this meant that she hadn’t had a way to warn Q of the problem, so he had actually come up to her and touched her… and if she hadn’t thrown him far away from her, out of her reach or even out of the reach she could have if she lunged, she would have raped him then and there.

There had been no help for it, nothing else that could be done. She had to be locked away, or she _would_ assault Q. Her control was gone, her need was consuming her, and none of the disciplines were helping in the slightest anymore. Her body, her mind, her survival drive, all conspired to betray her higher emotions and her ethics, and if she were not physically kept away from Q she wouldn’t be able to stop herself. Of course when Q had asked her how long it would be before he could let her out, she hadn’t told him that if she didn’t fulfill her need within a few days, she would die, burned out on adrenaline and lust. She’d told him that in three days she wouldn’t be a threat to him anymore. Which was quite true, because by then she’d be dead, unconscious or too weak to move.

But when it was done and she was locked up in the dark, the emotions she could no longer control overwhelmed her. She’d masturbated again, just to get enough control over the lust that she could feel _anything_ else, and when orgasm had lulled her overwhelming need into temporary remission, despair and grief had taken over. She was going to die, horribly. Perhaps no one could _see_ her humiliation anymore, but they could all hear her. She had thought that she cared little for her own life – she had cast it away, after all, and Lhoviri had had to go to great effort to convince her to live at all. The most important thing had been doing the job Lhoviri had required of her, repaying the debt for his work in undoing her crime. If she had to die protecting Q, she had thought that that would be perfectly acceptable. But no, it seemed she had developed much more attachment to her existence than that.

She didn’t want to leave Q behind, alone, and she didn’t want to lose Tris and Sovaz again when she had just been reunited with them and mended the rift caused by the crimes no one but she remembered anymore. And at the base of it, she just didn’t want to die. She had died before, and knew there was nothing beyond it, regardless of what Q said. It was not something to be feared, particularly – it was nonexistence, oblivion. The dead didn’t care that they were dead. But it was the end of experience, the end of thinking, the end of _being_. What she felt when she thought of her own impending death was much more grief than fear; if she died, she would be separated from everything she enjoyed by the simple fact that she wouldn’t exist to enjoy them anymore. And it was so horribly unfair that she should die this way, that something the Ferengi thought was a practical joke they could use to humiliate Q by tormenting “his woman” would _kill_ her, because they were ignorant and because they couldn’t give her what she needed and because neither could Q, not without paying a price she was not willing to make him pay.

The entire night she did not sleep. She swung back and forth between rage at the Ferengi, grief for herself, and her horrifyingly mind-destroying lust for Q. She masturbated so often her clitoris was raw, but it gave her less and less relief each time, until finally she couldn’t even _have_ orgasms from it anymore, her body stretched tight on the rack of need, wound tighter and tighter and unable to achieve even the tiniest modicum of relief. She paced in the closet, energy coiling through her that had no release, and punched the walls until her already sore and bloody knuckles tore again, kicked the wall with her bare feet until they were so bruised and battered she could barely still walk on them, and still the energy would not allow her to be still. She was so exhausted, so weary, but when she tried to lie down her entire body twitched and jerked and writhed until she had to get up again and keep pacing, exercising, doing what few martial arts she could in such a tiny space.

She begged Lhoviri for some way out of this, some last-minute miraculous recovery, and laughed mockingly at herself because she knew perfectly well Lhoviri wasn’t her god and wasn’t going to intervene directly to save her. Given how much recovered Q was from his suicidal depression, in fact, Lhoviri might actually have no further use for her. For all she knew Lhoviri had engineered this whole thing to remove her from Q’s life now that her purpose was done. And with all the terrible things Lhoviri had allowed to happen to Q, who he was ostensibly watching out for, it was impossible to imagine that he would actually do anything for _her_.

By the time morning came she was broken, desperate. She pleaded with Q to give her the release she needed, knowing that he wasn’t actually even in the room to hear her because she couldn’t hear or smell him. And then she’d heard the outer door open, the Ferengi come in the room and announce himself, and knew it meant Q would come out where he could hear her, but she couldn’t stop. In fact knowing that Q would hear her now made her beg more desperately, forcing a voice hoarse from exhaustion and dehydration and too much screaming to keep talking, keep begging, because if he heard her surely he would come to her and open the door and save her, surely he would satisfy her, and she couldn’t stop thinking of what it would be like if she could finally touch him and get some relief from this.

Fantasies of flinging Q to the floor, ripping his clothes off, plunging her tongue into his mouth and her telepathy into his mind and swallowing his penis with her hungry vagina, grinding against him and pounding herself against his body and feeling his mind in hers, forcing her pleasure into him and then satisfying the needs she’d impose on him as she’d use his body to satisfy her needs, consumed her. When she’d heard him say that he would open the door, that was all she could think of doing, all she could want. Only at the last possible moment did she remember why she didn’t want to do that, why doing that to Q was the worst possible betrayal she could commit. She’d pulled herself together just enough to warn him off, to tell him what kind of danger he’d be in if he did let her out. And then he hadn’t let her out. He’d asked her what was wrong with her, as if she could actually tell him where the Ferengi could hear, and all she could think was that he wasn’t letting her out, he wasn’t giving her what she needed to live, and her mood had swung back to rage and lust and she’d started throwing herself at the door, screaming at him to let her out, to give her the release she needed so desperately.

And now he was gone, and she was broken again, overwhelmed with grief and exhaustion. Q wouldn’t save her, because she had stopped him from doing so. He would stand by and let her die, because she had never told him what was at stake. It was all her own fault, all things she had done to protect him, but it meant there would never ever ever be a release from this pain and need until she was dead of it. She thought of the red shoes in the Terran children’s story, of being compelled to dance until you dropped dead of exhaustion. It didn’t sound like such a horrible death to a small child; in fact it had sounded kind of funny. But it wasn’t funny at all, was it. Being driven to move until your body burned out, being exhausted and wanting sleep and being wholly unable to until you died of it… this was a truly terrible way to die. And the humiliation of it, the fact that she could barely talk, that she couldn’t have a sane and rational conversation with a fellow sentient being for longer than five minutes before her need would compel her to do something completely irrational, the fact that other people could hear her total loss of emotional control… she almost wished death would come faster, would free her of this horror. If she _did_ live through this, she would never be able to bear the humiliation; almost better to die.

But she still didn’t want to die.

At least, she thought, Q would be safe. If there was anything she could cling to for comfort, it was that she couldn’t harm him. She wanted him so very badly, but it would destroy him if she took him; now she was locked away to die, and he had no idea she was dying, would never know what she was going through until it was too late and she could not harm him.

* * *

In engineering, Q met with Yalit. She immediately fixated on his papers. “What are those?”

“The solution to your little problem,” Q said. “Of course, I’ve altered the diagrams in crucial ways so that if you try to follow what I’ve written down, _just_ the way I’ve written it down, you really will blow us all up. You’ll need me to interpret the design for you, but this is the basic outline of how we would remodel the transwarp drive so that it would actually work. In fact you could build one from scratch with these notes, if you had me to tell you what the diagrams are actually supposed to look like. You don’t even need to modify the one on this ship; you could use the replicators to build a new one and install it on your own ship.”

Yalit glared at the papers. “And exactly why am I supposed to believe you’d do such a thing? You’ve cooperated, if I can even call it that, _very_ reluctantly. Even after I disciplined you for lying to me, you sat back and blithely let us run into a failure that blew out the power net.”

“Well, since you made it clear yesterday that even if I _warn_ you that you’re making a mistake, you’ll completely ignore me, make the mistake, and then blame me and threaten to torture me for _your_ failure, I thought it was fairly imperative to make sure you don’t make any more mistakes. With this, I can ensure that if you follow my instructions, you can build the thing you want to sell without any more problems. And I’ve made decoding the thing properly complicated enough that if I’m in too much pain or fear to think straight, I won’t be able to decipher my own notes correctly, which will probably result in all of us dying. So you have incentive, now, _not_ to hurt me.”

“And how do I know you’re not going to blow up the ship anyway?”

“Well, firstly, because you can test any component I show you. And secondly… given what you and I discussed about _why_ I didn’t blow up the ship yesterday…” His expression hardened. “You’re going to treat T’Laren for whatever you’ve done to her, because that’s the only way you can be sure that _any_ advice I give you won’t blow up the ship. She’s gone insane from whatever you did, and I know for a fact she would rather die than live that way. So unless you have a way to undo it, give her the antidote to your drugs or fix whatever it is you’ve done… you have no more leverage against me, and you won’t be able to trust _anything_ I tell you.”

“You so sure I have no leverage against you? I have _this_.” She patted the neurowhip coiled on the belt that was the only article of clothing she was wearing at all.

He would not show her fear. Not now. “All that little device is going to do for you is make me _more_ dedicated to the cause of killing myself, or you, or all of us,” Q said softly. “Yes, you can make me break down and promise you anything. We’ve seen that much. But we’ve also seen that you can’t actually check my work well enough to be _certain_ I’m not lying to you. So unless you have a way to make sure T’Laren survives, and gets well, you may as well just sell me off now and forget about transwarp, because you can’t solve it without me and you can’t trust me if she dies or loses her mind permanently.”

And then Yalit laughed.

Q was taken aback. “Even to your puerile sense of humor, I’m sure what I said was not _that_ hilarious.”

“We can save your pal,” Yalit said, sneering and giggling at the same time. “We’d need to wait a day or so until she’s weaker for it to be safe, but my boys would be perfectly happy to help her out, even after everything she’s done. But if you want to speed things up, you can take matters into your own hands any time you want to take the risk.”

Q stared. “What are you talking about?”

Yalit was still laughing. “You don’t even know what’s wrong with her, do you?” She grinned even more broadly. “It’s that Romulan aphrodisiac stuff. Far togan, or whatever its name was. It’s actually true, all she needs is a good fuck.”

His blood went ice cold, remembering what T’Laren had said about that drug. _"The drug they spoke of would have killed me…" “I can't discuss this any further, Q. But yes. A drug that makes Romulans feel desire, kills Vulcans. I cannot explain..."_

“You’ve killed her,” he whispered in absolute horror. “She said… she said that stuff _kills_ Vulcans.”

“Oh, she was full of it,” Yalit snapped. “It wouldn’t do the Romulans a damn bit of good to use it to breed _female_ Vulcans if it killed them, now would it?”

“What?”

“It’s that stuff they use, you know. When they take Vulcan prisoners and they breed them, to get halfbreeds with Vulcan telepathy. They give it to the men to make them fuck, and they give it to the women to keep ‘em from blocking their own fertility with their minds, or whatever they do. All it does is make them need to have sex. Yeah, they’ll die if they don’t get fucked, but as long as they get a good long screw they’ll be fine.” She grinned at Q again. “Now, see, my boys were all ready to help your pal out, but she got violent with them, tried to kill them. So none of them want to go anywhere near her until she’s just about passed out from it. But, you know, she’s _such_ a good friend of yours… and she’s really suffering, you know. The way this stuff does for them, all she can think about is sex. You multiply the horniest you’ve ever been by about twenty thousand… well, according to you you’re never horny, so maybe you don’t get it, but the point is she’s crawling out of her skin. She needs a fuck so bad she can’t even _think_ about anything else… and maybe you’re man enough to give it to her. Or maybe you’re not, and she’ll have to suffer another day or two till my boys can take care of her.”

Q’s eyes were fixed on Yalit’s face, the horror he felt only growing with everything she said. He believed her completely, or at least, believed that she believed it. But if T’Laren had tried to kill the Ferengi rather than have sex with them, then it didn’t actually make it _better_ if they were saving her life. “You do realize that putting a person in a position where if they don’t have sex with you they’ll die is _still_ raping them, if they wouldn’t have touched you with someone else’s ten-meter pole before you drugged them.”

She scowled fiercely. “You don’t know a goddamn thing about it. You’re a man. What the fuck do you know about rape?”

“I know that it’s not what happens when your client stiffs you on the bill,” he snapped back. “Which seems to be more than you would know about it.”

Her face went purple. “How _dare_ you!” she snarled. She grabbed the neurowhip and poked it at him. Despite his rage at her for what she’d just admitted doing to T’Laren, he stepped back in sudden fear. “You think you have some concept of what rape is? How about I have my boys fuck _you_ up the ass? Then you might have some idea!”

“Don’t be a bigger moron than you already are,” Q snarled back. “I’m perfectly aware that violent sexual assault constitutes rape. You wouldn’t be teaching me anything I didn’t know already, you’d just be proving what a barbarian you are. But a_ny_ violation of your will, of what you’ve _chosen_ to do when you were in your right mind, any attempt to coerce your will or control you… it doesn’t matter if your body wants it at the moment because you’re drunk or drugged or because you’re going to die if you don’t do it, it is _still_ rape. Which is the part you don’t seem to be grasping, but I would imagine that a woman who voluntarily chose to live on a planet of virulently misogynistic cretins who have no concept that she has a mind, or a value outside of being a sexual orifice, might have some difficulty with the concept of _consent._ I could pity you for the things you’ve presumably endured at their hands, if it weren’t for the fact that you seem perfectly comfortable with turning around and inflicting those things on other people… not just on people who’ve done nothing except insult you, but on people who have literally done _nothing_ to you at _all._ T’Laren never harmed you, she never insulted you, she even tried to talk me into being slightly less vocal in my disgust with you, back on _Yamato_. But you’re quite fine with the notion of giving her a drug that compels her to have sex, so she can be a whore for your sons and grandsons, and you think this is perfectly okay because if she needs to have sex to save her life, she’d actually be _grateful_ for their abuses, or something. Or you actually just don’t think she’s a person and you don’t care, at all.”

“You really want me to whip you, don’t you?”

“Why don’t you just kill me? You’ve just ensured that I won’t do anything to help you achieve transwarp. Even if T’Laren lives through this… do you think she’s really going to want to remember being violated by your trollish offspring, even if that’s what’s needed to save her life from the problem _you_ caused her?”

“Well, if you’re so eager to protect her honor, you _could_ do her yourself. Assuming you can. She’s been begging for you for hours. _Maybe_ that means she won’t rip your lobes off and stomp your ribs in like she did to my grandsons.”

“I can’t believe you did this to her. I… even the _Ferengi_ are supposed to be more civilized than this. _Why?_ Why did you do this to someone who did you no harm? Just because it was fun?”

“I didn’t do you any goddamn harm before you started trying to destroy me!”

And that brought him up horribly short, because she was right. He had started insulting Yalit for his personal amusement, and to test her and see if she was worth his time, as soon as he met her, and he’d kept doing it because she kept rising to the bait and it was hilarious. He took a deep breath. “Maybe so. But there’s really several astronomical units’ worth of difference between tormenting someone with a few insults, and tormenting them with a drug that forces them to be raped or die.”

“It wouldn’t be rape if you did it for her. She wants _you_.” Her grin came back, more malicious than ever. “But you can’t, can you? Because having sex with a mortal’s like fucking a Klingon targ, for you. You couldn’t even get it up for her, could you?”

That would not be the problem. “Whether or not I can do what she needs isn’t the point. You’ve _already_ done the damage. She didn’t want me, before she was drugged; she made that perfectly clear. So you’ve changed what she wants, by force, with a drug. It won’t be any _less_ rape if I do it.”

“She doesn’t need it any less because you think it’d be raping her,” Yalit said. “And if you don’t, my boys will. We don’t kill prisoners if we don’t have to; that’s a waste of latinum. I can ransom her back to the Federation; they’ll think she knows something about where you’re going, and they’ll pay a pretty penny to have that information back in their hands, even if they weren’t soft enough to pay the ransom anyway. We’ll make sure she lives. We just have to wait until she can’t fight back. But whether you do her or not, _someone’s_ gonna give the poor Vulcan bitch the fuck of her life, and I bet she’d rather it be you. Too bad you’re a eunuch.”

Q swallowed. The thought of letting T’Laren suffer, for days, and then be raped by the Ferengi, after apparently she’d been so upset and frightened by the possibility that she had tried to _kill_ some of them, was completely unpalatable. But the other alternative really wasn’t appealing. Not when T’Laren had made it so very clear that if he let her out, she would hurt him. He strongly suspected the Ferengi were actually wrong about some part of this; T’Laren had been certain the drug would kill her, not just set her up to be raped. Something Yalit thought about this whole situation was wrong – not just morally wrong, which all of it was, but factually wrong. But he didn’t know what. What if he went to T’Laren, and she broke his bones and beat him senseless, and then she died anyway? What if she’d been both truthful and knowledgeable when she’d said with conviction that the drug would kill her?

If all she wanted from him was sex, she would never have asked him to lock her away. He’d _told_ T’Laren, when they’d been together aboard _Ketaya_ before docking with _Yamato_, that he’d be willing to give up his virginity for something more meaningful than the mere gratification of lust, and certainly saving a friend’s life qualified. He didn’t know whether she knew how attractive his body found her – he’d tried his best to hide that – but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, not with her life at stake. Of course he’d have agreed to help her, if sex was the only thing she needed. But she’d been convinced she would hurt him, and had begged him to lock her away, and given that T’Laren was not a moron and knew him better than any other mortal alive, he had to assume there was a reason for that. There was something she needed besides just sex.

“I tell you what. I’ll let you out of work today – you were burning the midnight oil last night to make those documents, I know. And if they’re what you say they are they’ll speed us up a lot. You wanna go back to your cell and see what you can do for your pal, I’ll let you do that.”

And watch every minute of it, Q realized. Possibly record it for posterity. Damn T’Laren and her decision to hide monitors in his room, anyway.

But what could he do? She was letting him go back to the cell to try to help T’Laren. He had no idea if he even _could_ help her – what if the reason she hadn’t come to him was that she knew her Vulcan strength and the irrationality the drug had pushed on her would cause her to break his fragile human body if they did have sex? What if there was nothing he could do to save her? But he couldn’t turn down the opportunity to at least _try_ to help his friend, and there was no way he could do anything for her at all if he wasn’t in the cell with her. “Fine. You do that. If she lives, you’ll still have something to hold over me to get me to give you transwarp without blowing up the ship.”

“I told you already, she’ll live. My boys are _more_ than capable of giving her what she needs.” Yalit leered. “Even with Vulcan stamina I’m sure twenty or so Ferengi boys can quiet her down just fine.”

He hadn’t thought it was possible to be more horrified by this situation. “_Twenty_?” Three Ferengi had taken her to the swimming pool, five had threatened her on the bridge, and he’d thought those things were terrible, but gang rape by twenty men was an order of magnitude worse than three or five.

“Sure, everyone aboard’s gonna want to take a turn. Of course, if you think you can be man enough for her, feel free to try. If you’re not enough for her, my boys don’t mind taking your leftovers.”

He really would find a way to blow up the ship before it came to that. Rape, per se, wasn’t a fate worse than death in his opinion, but being gang-raped by twenty men, and tortured with a drug that made your body betray you and _want_ it, after being made to suffer such horrible need that you literally lost your mind, really sounded like it might qualify. “If she’s actually been _asking_ for me, I’m sure she considers me far superior in any ability to meet her needs than your hideous brood.”

“I’m going to be _very_ interested in seeing if that’s true or not.” She waved at one of the male Ferengi. “Yark, Takim – take him back to his cell for the day. I’m taking the day off to go to the control room and watch the show.”

* * *

All the way back to the cell, Q’s mind raced, trying to figure out what the catch was, why T’Laren hadn’t simply told him what she needed, what it was she needed besides sex.

If it really was only sex, if that was all it had ever been, she would have been a fool to let herself suffer like this. He’d have helped her – not only willingly, but, he had to admit, happily. Not that anything made the Ferengi’s actions justifiable or better or a good thing in any sense, but… Q’s fear of mortal sexuality had never been about sex per se. Yes, it was disgusting, but so was eating and he’d gotten used to that. The problem had always been his fear of vulnerability, of humiliation, of what humans did to those who sought pleasure without having any idea how to return it. And if it was about saving a friend’s life, not about his personal pleasures, then there was no issue there. He didn’t need to be attractive, he didn’t need to be skilled, he could be completely inept and totally naïve and he’d still be a big hero for doing something distasteful for his friend’s sake. T’Laren wouldn’t humiliate him, or reject him, or give him a completely confusing speech about how he was attractive except he wasn’t, or give him patronizing advice, or look down on him… No, if all she needed was sex there was no downside to saving her.

But she had to _know_ that. He’d told her what his problems with sex were, he’d told her the conditions he’d need before he’d end his celibacy, and she’d know that saving her life would absolutely qualify. To be frank, in fact, saving her from extreme but not life-threatening discomfort would have qualified… to be brutally and totally frank, this was T’Laren, and he trusted her as much as he could trust any mortal being, and her opening up her mouth and telling him that she found him desirable and wanted to sleep with him _might_ quite possibly have qualified. Actually, as long as he could be sure that she wasn’t doing it because she thought he needed to learn about sex or as some sort of therapy, it almost certainly would have qualified.

He didn’t know if T’Laren had known exactly how pleased he’d have been at the opportunity to help her with her problem if it was only sex she needed, since he’d done his best to hide his body’s reactions to her, but he was sure she knew that he’d at least be willing. If he was willing to give himself up to a fairly agonizing death at the hands of the Calamarain to save people who had given him the most grudging of sanctuary, of course he’d be willing to have sex to save his best friend’s life. So there absolutely had to be more to it than that. But what?

She had been violent to him – had thrown him across the room when all he’d done was touch her, had warned him not to open the door or she would attack him. And she’d tried to kill the Ferengi. Was she afraid of accidentally killing him, or maiming him? It seemed possible, given the evidence, but… Q knew that Vulcan males had married human females. The famous scientist, diplomat and sidekick to the always amusing James T. Kirk, Spock, was the product of such a union. And if this drug worked by triggering the cycle T’Laren had said Vulcan males and the Vulcan women bonded to them suffered from anyway, then obviously humans could survive sex with Vulcans in its throes without getting badly hurt. Q might feel more fragile than the average human, having had invulnerability to compare his current mortality to, but he knew, intellectually, that the average human woman was weaker than he was, or at least weaker than he was when he wasn’t starving himself to death. If human women could survive sex with Vulcan men in _pon farr_, he should be able to survive sex with a Vulcan woman, particularly one who claimed she was weaker than the average Vulcan from being raised in Earth gravity. It was possible that the drug made its victims _more_ violent than the regular _pon farr_ did, but then it would be a remarkably stupid drug for the Romulans to give to the captives they wanted to rape and breed… especially the women, who they could probably rape and impregnate without help from a drug.

And then he remembered, from the information he’d seen in tr’Sahlassiu’s mind, _why_ Romulans wanted to breed with Vulcan captives, and he remembered exactly what T’Laren had said about what the drug would do to her, and everything clicked horribly into place.

“_The need to mate or die appears linked to the genes that control telepathy. So evolutionarily, telepathy must have conveyed enough of an advantage that the trait did not die out.”_

“…_you would make a very unpleasant meld partner. My sexuality is inextricably tied to my telepathy-- I am better off with my own imagination than with a man I can’t meld with.”_

“…_a Vulcan male will endure... a mating cycle. That is... he becomes incapable of thinking about much else. And if he does not, during this time, mate with someone and establish a telepathic bond with them, he will die.”_

“…_It arouses the __plak tow__, the blood fever. Only a combination of sex and a mind meld would save my life then, and I cannot meld with Ferengi. But before I died I would be consumed with madness-- violence as much as lust…”_

It wasn’t about sex. Not only sex, anyway. She needed sex _and_ a mindmeld.

The door to his room opened, and Q stumbled in, completely ignoring the innuendo of the Ferengi guards behind him and their snickering. It made sense, it made horrifying sense, because Ferengi were psi-null. Power like the Q had could read their minds, of course, but ordinary mortal telepaths couldn’t make any kind of connection; their four-lobed brains set up interference patterns of psi and antipsi such that no mortal telepath could read them. If T’Laren needed sex _and_ a telepathic connection, it wouldn’t matter how many Ferengi men had intercourse with her. The cycle wouldn’t complete, and it would never end.

The horror of it was stunning. Yalit didn’t know, none of the Ferengi knew, but what they thought was a hilarious practical joke, and an opportunity to gang-rape T’Laren while making her react as if she found it pleasurable, would kill her. She’d been right, and Yalit was wrong. Twenty Ferengi goons could gang-rape her and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. She’d still need, and need, until she died of it.

And it made sense why T’Laren had been begging for him, why she had made him lock her away. Maybe her throwing him across the room hadn’t been an act of violence like he’d thought; maybe she’d been trying to get him out of range so she wouldn’t force a mindmeld on him. Because if what he suspected was true… and he was becoming more and more sure that it was… he was the only other being on this ship with a psionic presence of any kind. He was the _only_ person here who could give T’Laren what she needed to live.

If only it had been anything else. He sat down at the table and slumped, supporting his head by resting his forehead on his open palm, his elbow on the table and his arm pointing up to brace his head. In the closet, T’Laren had been crying weakly when he came in, and now she was begging again, her voice even more hoarse and broken than it had sounded earlier this morning. He could even have borne the threat of physical violence more easily than this. If he’d thought T’Laren would break his ribs or his limbs or make him engage in sex acts so rough he ended up bruised and battered, that would have been better than this. Frankly, if he’d thought T’Laren would grow a penis and need to rape him anally like Yalit had threatened to have her goons do to him, it would have been better than this. A Q had no particular attachment to genital integrity as opposed to any other body part; pain was pain, and while pain caused by someone else using you for sexual pleasure was certainly horribly humiliating, so was pain caused by someone else beating and kicking and stomping on you, or pain caused by someone pinning you down and flogging you with a neurowhip. Being made helpless, suffering pain at someone else’s hands and being made to beg and scream… that was about equally horrible whether they did it by stripping you naked and forcing you into sex acts or by cutting your skin with bone knives while you were tied down and gagged or by covering you with stinging insects. Q had perhaps picked up more of the unique emotional charge mortals applied to sexuality from having been among humans so long than he’d have felt when he first became human, and certainly being sexually molested held its own horrors and humiliations for him after what he’d learned from the incident with Amy Frasier, but he didn’t have thousands of years of being afraid of physical rape.

Mental rape, the mind and self being invaded against one’s will, _was_ what the Q considered rape, with anything anyone could do to his body only the palest shadow. And if he was right, then T’Laren didn’t just need to use his body. She needed to invade his mind.

No. He couldn’t do it. Maybe if he hadn’t been attacked by tr’Sahlassiu _and_ if T’Laren was obviously in her right mind, in control of herself, able to take things slow and pull back if he needed her to and leave the parts of him he really wanted to keep private alone. Maybe he’d have been able to bring himself to do it then. But the point was moot. T’Laren was totally out of control, and wanted to merge that raging force of id, that consuming madness, with _his_ mind, take his rationality from him and infect him with her diseased mind. What tr’Sahlassiu had done to him had been terrible, but by Q standards what T’Laren wanted from him, needed from him, was actually _worse._

In the Continuum most pleasures, and most intimacies, were shared by joining energies, touching minds together in whatever level of depth and intensity the two or more Q engaged in it should desire. The deepest, most profound intimacy was the total joining of two minds. It was also the deepest, most profound horror, because children devoured each other that way and it ran the terrible risk of destroying the two separate entities involved, creating a new being with the strongest traits of both. Generally speaking, any Q who could possibly find such a fate attractive met it very young, but most Q did, sooner or later, engage in the total joining with another Q as an act of love and trust, both parties relying on their own and the other’s strength of will and ego to be able to disengage again.

A life history of millions of years meant that there were very few things that the Q were capable of that Q himself had not engaged in at least a few times, but he had always been very reluctant to engage in a deep joining. He’d done it occasionally, of course, but not in a very, very long time… in fact, now that he thought about it, he realized that while he’d always been reluctant to engage in deep joining, he’d completely stopped after five older Q had jumped him, forced a joining on him with all of them, and used his mental defenselessness after they’d invaded him completely to try to rewrite him into someone else, and he’d felt what they felt and known what they’d known and seen every operation they planned to perform, every change they were sketching out in pencil on his consciousness before they committed it to ink, and they had penetrated and controlled him so completely that he couldn’t even scream. Funny, that. After Queria had saved him, and his assailants had been banished from the Continuum, he’d thought the whole thing was over with and he would never be bothered by it again. It had never occurred to him while he was still a Q, and in fact it probably couldn’t possibly have occurred to him before he did therapy with T’Laren, that there was in fact a direct causal connection between the attack he’d suffered fifty thousand years ago and the utter shallowness of his romantic/friendly relations with other Q for his entire adult life.

In the Continuum, Q had been an expert on giving other Q pleasure, making them lose control, yield all their defenses _to_ him, while giving very, very little ground himself. He’d been very good at losing control in a completely controlled way, channeling all the pleasure they could make _him_ feel back at them in a feedback loop, letting his surface thoughts be completely swept away by sublime ecstasies while keeping his deeper places private and untouched. He had not been good at all at true intimacy, and in fact one of the reasons he’d learned to be so good at overwhelming other Q with pleasure was that when other Q were utterly lost in pleasure, completely in your power, they couldn’t muster up the concentration to try to penetrate _you_ more deeply or even complain about the fact that you still had shields up inside. The other Q, not being exactly stupid, knew precisely what he was up to – though most likely few of them had ever bothered to think about why either; the Q simply did not think in terms of past trauma affecting individuals’ behavior in the present, given how untraumatic most of their lives had been. They had just always assumed he had no interest in deep intimacy with them… which, he suspected now, was one of the reasons he was here today. A Q who could only join fully with the entire Continuum at once, and only at the moments when they were entirely the overmind, wasn’t nearly as _continuous_ as the Q who could freely share most of themselves most of the time with most of the others. He certainly had broken rules, flouted authority and even committed crimes, but if there were any Q who considered him an intimate friend, he’d probably have gotten probation or a less serious exile, with powers. Funny when you put it that way. He’d been condemned to humanity for being too shallow, too focused on pure pleasure, and not loving enough in bed, in human terms.

And when tr’Sahlassiu had mindmelded with him, the very _first_ thing the Romulan had tried was a merging of minds, just like a Q joining, except with him as the obviously weaker and less powerful target, which made it a lot more like a devouring. Or a lot more like the attack the five older ones had perpetrated on him. And then when Q had fought that off, he’d been able to see in the other’s mind that it had been intended to be _exactly_ like the attack the five older ones had perpetrated on him… he hadn’t thought about that at the time, hadn’t articulated _why_ this was so familiar and so completely terrifying, but tr’Sahlassiu had wanted to merge minds with him and then use his own position as the telepathically stronger one to rewrite Q’s personality and perceptions, make him into a person who would welcome repeated future violations so tr’Sahlassiu could steal every last drop of his vast knowledge. Q had fought back against that, kept his ego separate from tr’Sahlassiu’s and forced the man to go after his knowledge directly… but that had been fighting back against a combat telepath who meant him nothing but harm.

T’Laren wasn’t after his memories or his knowledge. If she needed a mindmeld, what she needed was _him_. His self, his emotions, his consciousness. He wouldn’t be able to keep his ego separate. Giving himself over to her would involve being intimate with another mind in a way he hadn’t surrendered to since he’d been forced to by the Q who had attacked him. And to be perfectly honest, it wasn’t something he’d _ever_ liked doing. Oh, it wasn’t that it hadn’t been enjoyable; the Q were evolved to like joining with each other for similar reasons to why humans had evolved to like sex. The Continuum overmind wasn’t possible without the Q naturally seeking connections with one another. But it had been terrifying _before_ it had been used as a weapon against him.

It was out of the question. There was absolutely no way he could do this. He’d rather be beaten to death. He might have contemplated surrendering to _that_ if that was the issue; he wasn’t overly attached to his life, especially not a life where he would most likely be sold into slavery or to enemies who wanted to execute him. But no matter what the Ferengi did to him or who they sold him to, his mind would remain his own, untouched. That wouldn’t be true if he went to T’Laren.

His breathing grew ragged. If he didn’t go to her, she would die. Horribly. After being gang-raped, since he had no power to stop the Ferengi from carrying through Yalit’s threat if he didn’t provide her with the entertainment she was obviously expecting, and T’Laren would be in no shape to defend herself. He couldn’t let that happen. But there didn’t seem to be any way to avoid it aside from the thing he couldn’t bring himself to do. He couldn’t give T’Laren a mercy killing – Yalit wasn’t going to be stupid enough to take any of his advice on transwarp until the situation with T’Laren was resolved. Which, according to T’Laren, it would be in three days. Why hadn’t he seen it? She hadn’t said “I’ll be better in three days”, she’d said “I’ll be no threat to you in three days.” Meaning she’d be dead. And there was no way he could get the ship blown up before then. There was no way he could physically put her out of her misery – if he went anywhere near her she’d take what she needed from him. He couldn’t heal her, he couldn’t cure her, he couldn’t singlehandedly overpower the Ferengi and get her medical help. He probably couldn’t get the Ferengi to find some random human man who wouldn’t have a problem with mindmelds to help her out.

There was no other way.

But he couldn’t. He couldn’t possibly. If it had been a Q who needed him to join with her or die, he still couldn’t have done it.

And then he stopped breathing, his throat closing and his lungs paralyzed as if he’d been kicked in the solar plexus, as he realized… he _hadn’t_ done it when a Q he’d loved had needed him to, to save her life. He had shut Azi out for how many millennia? And worse, he hadn’t let her get what she needed from other Q either, driving off anyone _else_ willing to join fully with her, because he obviously knew better what was good for her than she did and he couldn’t imagine that she knew what she was doing and could handle the danger and he couldn’t face his dearest friend, practically the only being in the universe who he actually felt protective toward, willingly subjecting herself to _his_ greatest fear. He had had millions of opportunities to give her what she’d needed, or let her get it somewhere else, and he’d been too afraid, and he’d convinced himself he was doing it for her sake and he knew best, and he’d driven her to insanity. Of course she had attacked him. He had thought that at least he’d been justified in the things he’d done that she’d tried to kill him for, that his only crime in the whole sordid mess had been what _he’d_ done when _she_ had driven him to insanity with her attack and its aftermath, but no. No. It was his fault from the beginning.

Q forced himself to start breathing normally again. He was not going to break down and cry in front of the Ferengi’s monitors.

It had been easy enough to offer himself up to the Calamarain – he’d known that if he hadn’t done it he would eventually die anyway, and drag the _Enterprise_ and possibly the entire world of Bre’el IV down with him. It had been easy enough to give himself up to the Borg – he had known for an absolute certainty that the Continuum would never let him be assimilated, so even if the Borg had disabled whatever suicide capsule he used to kill himself, the Continuum would have made sure he died first. If they had been less concerned than he was about his knowledge being used to empower the Borg over the other species in the galaxy, they would at least be worried about his knowledge of the weaknesses of the _Q_ falling into Borg hands. So the only thing he’d risked was his mortal life, which would have ended anyway if the Borg had destroyed Starbase 56. All the times he’d risked his life or contemplated self-sacrifice, it had always been only his life at stake, and after becoming mortal it wasn’t as if his life was really all that valuable anymore, and often the situation was one that would kill him anyway if no one else stepped in to save the day.

Yielding his mind… was different. It was a sacrifice he _could_ have made when he was still Q, when the life and sanity of the Q he most loved had been on the line, and despite his countless opportunities he never had. It wasn’t inevitable, unlike death as a mortal. It would make him vulnerable to the thing he most feared, the thing he had feared for millennia, the thing he’d feared even when he’d been immortal, omnipotent, virtually invulnerable and fearless.

And if he didn’t do it, the only person who had showed him any genuine compassion since Data had saved his life on the _Enterprise_ would die a hideous, degrading death.

There really wasn’t a choice here, was there?

Almost mechanically, barely aware of the motions he was making, he got up and walked to the closet door. His heart was pounding so hard he felt as if it might break his ribs open and fall out, and his vision had tunneled and he wasn’t exactly looking at anything anyway, finding his way to the door more by muscle memory than by paying any attention to the world outside the screaming terror in his head. His stomach had clenched so hard he might have thrown up if he weren’t almost completely detached from his own body and its sensations, like he was still a Q and the mortal avatar was a puppet he was manipulating from a distance rather than actually _him_ now.

This was like the kind of nightmare where part of your mind knew exactly what horror awaited you if you did that thing, and you were screaming at yourself not to do it, but the part of your mind that controlled your dream-body was completely oblivious and just went ahead and did whatever it was, Q thought. Except that the part of his mind screaming was being overridden by the part of him that had a conscience. How strange. Before he became mortal, if anyone had actually _asked_ him if he’d had a conscience he would have laughed. Who knew?

He pressed the button and the door opened.

T’Laren threw herself on him, knocking him to the floor, before he really had a chance to even see her. Q screamed – he’d been braced for _something_, but having someone jump on him and bear him down to the floor was still shocking. She was completely naked, writhing against him, and her hands reached up for his face, her fingers reaching to his temples and forehead. He tried to bat her hand away, but it did him no good; as he pushed her hands away from his face she lowered her head to his and kissed him, and he was too startled to try to twist away. Her lips on his sent tingles through his body like random, tiny shocks of pleasure all throughout him, and then he felt the same cold fire burning that he’d felt when tr’Sahlassiu was attacking him. The sensation wasn’t localized anywhere in his skin; it seemed to be coming from within his mind, like the sensation of swooning or becoming dizzy did.

When tr’Sahlassiu had attacked him his body had fallen away, and he’d lost any sense of it. That didn’t happen now. As he felt T’Laren’s presence pressing against his mind, he became hyper-aware of his own body _and_ of hers, her skin fiery against his, every place that her body pressed against his burning with both real and metaphorical heat. T’Laren’s skin had always been warmer than his own, as if she had a fever, but now she was so hot touching her would be uncomfortable if she weren’t pure sex. This was like the disturbing dreams he’d had aboard _Yamato_, where he was essentially paralyzed, pinned down and helpless and T’Laren was touching him and all he could feel was pleasure, drowning him. Her hands, instead of trying to touch his face anymore, were tugging at his shirt, hard enough that the collar was digging into the skin at the back of his neck and it might have hurt if there weren’t so many other sensations pouring through him. Q moaned, involuntarily pressing his hips up against her, and she pushed into his mind, a swirling almost mindless morass of arousal and need, and he felt his sense of himself slipping under the assault and he screamed again, trying to struggle, trying to shield himself against her, but the needs of his body flooding through him made it impossible to concentrate and he couldn’t pull up his shields and he was losing himself and the old terror surged, memory of other Q inside him taking his self away and making him someone else. The fear took him completely, and he screamed and screamed, unable to stop the invasion of his mind in any way and equally unable to stop being terrified of it.

And then T’Laren’s presence was gone, along with the hyperawareness of both their bodies’ surfaces that had completely confused his proprioception and made him lose his sense of which body was his. He was himself, alone, lying on the floor and T’Laren had backed away, was kneeling on the floor half a meter away from him, crawling backward.

He sat up. She was crying, silently, her face twisted with pain, her cheeks wet and her eyes spilling over with tears. “I… will not… harm you,” she whispered, the words slow and hoarse and sounding as if she was dragging them up and out against some kind of impossible gravity. “Lock… me… away…”

Q stood up. He was shaking, but it wasn’t all fear. The sensations she’d awakened in his body hadn’t simply gone away when her mind had; he was so hard it hurt and his skin so sensitive, so needy, that his own shirt brushing against his nipples and stomach made him want to breathe heavily with reaction. He looked down at T’Laren, and his heart turned over in his chest. Having shared her mind for just the briefest of moments made him want sex more badly than he’d ever had in his human life, including when Amy Frasier had been actively fondling his genitals and hadn’t yet told him that he was just a particularly exotic notch on her belt. He _knew_ how hard it was for her to back away, to stay away from him; he knew how desperately she wanted, needed him. But she had pulled herself away because he’d been terrified and she didn’t want him to suffer. She was _dying_, but she still refused to simply take what she needed at his expense.

If it weren’t for the fact that he was fairly certain he was incapable of the emotion, at least as humans understood it, he might have thought he loved her then.

He swallowed. “No, T’Laren. I’m not going to lock you up.”

A sob broke in her voice. “_Please_… lock me… away… I… I will _not_… I will not _harm_ you..”

“It’s… it’s all right, T’Laren. I know what I’m doing.” His mouth was completely dry. Q swallowed again, and still couldn’t get rid of the hoarseness in his own voice. “You… you can have what you need. It’s all right. I’m… willing.” For moderate and completely confused values of willing, anyway. His body wanted her more than he’d imagined possible, and he was still terrified of losing his self in her, and he was overwhelmed with fierce and tender protectiveness toward her, that she could actually overcome her need long enough to think of his fears. Q backed away from her toward the door of the bedroom, and then at the look of utter confusion on her face, he undid the fasteners on his shirt and pulled it off. Her eyes fixed on him hungrily, desperately, and the look was as terrifying and arousing as everything else that had happened since he opened the door. In his entire human existence, no one had looked at him like that; no one had wanted him like that, even when he’d been attractive from much more recent godhood. The back of his neck actually hurt quite a bit where her yanking on his shirt had dug into his skin, and the cool air of the room on his hungry skin made him shudder. “I’d rather we did this in a bed than on the floor, don’t you think? I mean, traditionally, that _is_ where such things are done, aren’t they?”

She got to her feet slowly, looking at him as if he were a mirage she expected to pop any minute. “You… you fear this,” she whispered.

“Yeah.” Damn this dry mouth anyway. He wondered if he had a chance to get a glass of water before she jumped him again. “Yeah, I… I’m not particularly fond of mind melds, you know that. But Yalit explained what’s going on. You need me, or you’ll die. So…” he shrugged, trying to pretend to be nonchalant and well aware he was failing utterly, “here I am. Come and get some.”

She followed him, her eyes fixed on him as if she were completely mesmerized by him. He didn’t dare turn around, afraid she’d lunge at him once his back was turned. Q backed into the bedroom – where there probably were still monitors, he knew, but at least he could lock the door so they couldn’t _physically_ get in – and up to the bed.

Even with her hair wild and mussed like the worst bed head ever and her eyes bright green and bloodshot, T’Laren was beautiful. Aesthetically, she was form and grace and power, the energy coiled in her graceful movements reminiscent of a giant cat, padding toward its prey. In senses rather more visceral than pure aesthetic appreciation, her tan skin was sheened with sweat, glistening, and her breasts were firm and round and perfect, brown nipples hard against greenish-brown areolae, and her legs and hips brought images to his mind that any other day he would have declared disgusting and castigated himself for even being able to think of, but right now it was his body that wanted to do the right thing and his mind that was cringing away in terror, and if he could shut his own terror out for a moment by thinking of what he hoped her body might feel like against his, he’d get through this a lot easier. His pants were painfully tight. Q undid the somewhat complicated fastenings that held them on, and let them drop to the floor. To be honest his underwear was painfully tight too, but he simply couldn’t bring himself to just take them off in front of another person, particularly not when he was so very hard, although at the moment it wasn’t exactly as if T’Laren would laugh at him for having an erection.

She came toward him. Q sat down on the bed. “It’s all right, T’Laren,” he said again. “I’ll do whatever you need me to do. I’m not going to let you die.”

“I… don’t want… to hurt… you…”

“I’d rather you didn’t hurt me either, but you know, we can’t always get what we want. You need this, you’ll die without it… fine, I’m offering.”

And then she was reaching to touch his face again. Q trembled, but didn’t try to push her away. This time he was better prepared. He’d made the decision to offer himself up before but he hadn’t known what it would feel like, and she’d moved so fast, so brutally, he hadn’t had time to emotionally accept what intellectually he’d already decided to endure. He was ready now, or as ready as anyone ever got to face the thing they were most afraid of in the entire universe.

The cold fire washed over him again, and with it, his sense of her mind and her body and her overwhelming need, making him want as badly as she did. He pulled her down onto the bed next to him, and her mind poured into him, entering him and mingling with his mind, and the physical desire and the power of her mind swamped his consciousness again. He was going down, losing himself, and there was utter terror and there was overwhelming desire and then he was not.

* * *

Their lips met again, this time with all the fervor and passion and experience of T’Laren’s extensive sexual history. Their hands worked together to remove his briefs, their hands roaming over their bodies to soothe the burning need to be touched, feed the skin hunger and send waves of pleasure through their bodies. Then they had his body as naked as they needed it to be, and they locked themselves together, him penetrating her, her engulfing him, and it was so good their shared mind orgasmed then and there, shuddering through pleasure more intense than they could recall from either of their sets of memories.

But the need was still there, unquenched by a single orgasm. They didn’t separate. They lay together, still one inside the other, and kissed and stroked each other’s bodies for the few minutes it took before his body could respond to the need they both still felt. And then they were moving together, hard and fierce and passionate. Their hands and mouths found the sensitive places on their bodies and caressed or licked or sucked on them, heightening the sensations. They touched her clitoris, stroking it gently, because it was very sore, but the sensations were too maddening for them to bear and they had to use a firmer, more rhythmic touch, ignoring the soreness they could still feel echoes of in favor of the need burning through both their bodies. They sucked their nipples and kissed their necks and lips and squeezed their buttocks and their breasts and pounded their hips against each other, one entity in two bodies and both bodies utterly overwhelmed with desire, need and pleasure.

When climax finally came, it was deep, all-consuming, convulsing every muscle in both their bodies with ecstasy. It went on and on, impossible tension coiling even tighter, and tighter, and then finally releasing in a paroxysm of sweet pleasure. For the first time in days, the body that was T’Laren’s felt relief, a release of the terrible energy consuming her, and her mind fell out of their joining into the delicious darkness of sleep, leaving Q’s mind his own again, semiconscious and more than a little dazed by what had just happened.

For several minutes he lay next to T’Laren’s sweat-drenched body, boneless, mind drifting, slowly remembering who and where he was. And then he laughed in delight, rolling over to curl against T’Laren’s body, pressing his skin against hers again as sweet waves of afterglow lapped over him slowly.

He’d done it. Not just the aspect of finally experiencing mortal sex, and finding that he wished he hadn’t wasted three years trying to avoid it, but he had lost himself completely in someone else, merging minds so completely that he’d had no separate consciousness anymore… and he’d come back out of it intact, without even having had to struggle or work to separate as two Q would have had to. He was safely anchored in mortal flesh, something he’d never thought of as a positive attribute until now; he could join completely and totally with another mind, become part of a gestalt sharing a single consciousness, and then return to being his own self without any risk of being changed or devoured. Mortals, or at least mortals engaged in a Vulcan mind meld, _couldn’t_ lose themselves that way. Sooner or later, the power that made the connection would fail, because Vulcans were mortal and had finite energy, and when their telepathy shut down the two minds would naturally separate again.

As a mortal, he could have the deepest, most dangerous pleasure a Q could experience without any threat to his identity or integrity whatsoever. He laughed harder, and hoped the Continuum was reading his mind right now, because he really wanted them to bite down on _that_ fact like it was a particularly sour lemon and suck. The punishment they’d inflicted on him, almost uniformly horrible up until now, had freed him to have the one thing he hadn’t dared to have when he was all-powerful. Not that the freedom to merge minds _actually_ made up for the loss of his powers, but it was a completely unexpected side benefit that provided the first modicum of compensation for his loss he’d encountered in three years.

It felt so good to lay here pressed up against her – even though he normally wasn’t particularly fond of physical contact unless it was a backrub, the pleasure he felt now from simply having his skin against another mortal’s warmth was sweeter than anything he’d experienced in his mortal life… well, aside from the mind-bogglingly intense orgasms he’d just had, but it was a lot easier to think through this kind of pleasure. Orgasms were like backrubs; both were deliciously pleasurable but derived most of their pleasure from the release of tension and need. This simple contact was a much purer pleasure, not dependent on any kind of need for its sweetness, just wonderful in and of itself. He felt totally relaxed, barely able to move and completely unconcerned with it.

For a short while he drifted off to sleep; he’d also had a sleepless night. But when he felt a hand moving on him, running along his side, it woke him easily and without fear or exhaustion; he could feel her sense of presence, a connection in his mind where there hadn’t been one before, and he knew even before he was awake exactly who was touching him and exactly what she intended. Apparently the pon farr wasn’t usually satisfied by a single mating; she would continue to become aroused very, very easily and need frequent sexual release for some time. The thought made his groin stir. He’d slept long enough for the human male refractory period to end, and if T’Laren’s arousal spilling through the link hadn’t been enough to stimulate him, the memory of the pleasure they’d experienced this morning might have been enough to make him harden again all by itself. Really, why _had_ he avoided this for three years? It was infinitely better than masturbation had ever been; the feeling that there was actually someone else there who cared about making one feel good made everything seem much less shameful and debauched. He wasn’t a complete loser for fantasizing about imaginary sex with people who didn’t in reality give a damn about him, he was actually _with_ someone who wanted him. Wanted _him_. It had been so very long since he’d felt that anyone wanted him. Elejani Baíi had been offering him charity based on her feelings of gratitude, and Harry… Harry flirted with every tall smart humanoid man he met, which on a starbase dedicated to scientific pursuits was a significant part of the population. It was a bit flattering, but Q had hardly felt special being the object of Harry’s attentions. But at least right now, in this time and place, T’Laren wanted _him_, specifically.

And he wanted her, he admitted to himself. He had for some time. He’d told himself it was some passing whim of his body’s the way most of the physical attractions he felt were, but if it had only been his body that had wanted her, he wouldn’t have felt compelled to fantasize about her being with him the last time he’d masturbated, when he’d had that dream and then found her in skimpy exercise clothes. He himself, his mind, had wanted her.

She reached for his temple, but he caught her hand and moved it away. “Not like that, this time,” he said. “Let’s do this as ourselves, this time. You can handle that, can’t you?”

T’Laren nodded, and he sensed her assent through the link they still shared. He didn’t mind having a link; it made the whole thing rather more like the pleasures the Q shared, and he was interested in seeing how much of his previous experience could apply here. He just didn’t want to join minds fully again. That had been… intense. After he’d been so terrified of it, he was still somewhat stunned at how good it had felt and how easy it had been to separate again, but it was too much to do again so soon. Apparently his brain had a longer refractory period than his penis did.

She reached out to his chest instead of his face and trailed her fingers down his body, stroking down to his inner thigh and then over to his groin. Q moaned, for a moment completely lost in the sensations, before he remembered that he’d actually wanted to have more control over things this time around. Part of him was insisting that he should just lay here and let her do as she wished with him; if he was passive then he didn’t have any responsibility if things didn’t go well, and he didn’t have to do any work, and all he had to do was surrender to pleasure, which, he had to admit, was affecting him a lot more thoroughly than it ever had when he was a Q. He couldn’t remember what the pleasures of being a Q had felt like, exactly, but he was pretty sure they were much more intense than this; still, a Q also had a much larger and more easily divisible consciousness than a human did, so even vastly more pleasurable sensations than a human body could bear couldn’t fill up a Q’s mind and crowd everything else out as easily as T’Laren’s hands on him were doing to his human psyche. He had always done this kind of thing to _other_ Q; no Q had ever been able to get him as thoroughly helpless and enthralled in pleasure as T’Laren was doing, mainly because he’d been a lot better at resisting it when he was a Q.

But he _wanted_ to take a more active role, for much the same reasons as he’d always taken a more active role with other Q. So he sat up, shifting his body slightly so T’Laren couldn’t easily reach his groin. She moved to his back and chest, running her hands all over his body, which was still very nice but not quite as derailing to his train of thought. Tentatively Q reached out for her breast, hazy memories of their joining earlier telling him that she would respond to almost anything he did to it. She sighed when he cupped it and moaned when he squeezed it gently, and then he remembered that she was a mammal and wired to want the nipples sucked, so he leaned down and tried that. That made her scream and arch her back, hands grabbing him and pulling him close.

This could be remarkably entertaining. In theory he should be able to get the upper hand here even though she was physically stronger, a telepath and had a lot more experience with this messy mortal form of exchanging pleasure than he did; she was also hypersensitive and had been suffering uncontrollable lust for days, and as long as he could keep her from actually merging minds with him he could avoid most of the desperate desire she was suffering from, which meant, in theory, he could keep his rationality and drive her absolutely mad with pleasure. Well, given that frustrated lust had in fact driven her nearly mad, maybe that was a bad metaphor, but the point was she was biologically programmed to totally lose her rationality to her sensations right now, and he wasn’t. If he could remember enough of the confused, jumbled and indistinct memories of what they’d done to each other before when their minds had been united to figure out what she would especially like, he could have her in his power, and that was a very enticing idea. T’Laren had had enormous power over him since they’d met, and any mortal who’d lived to adulthood in a mortal body had seemed to have power over him and his ignorance of the human condition, his entire human life, and sex in particular seemed very much a weapon other people might try to wield against _him_. The idea that he could actually do, as a mortal, what he’d have done to a lover when he was a Q, and control their responses, make them lose themselves in what he did to them, was exciting, and seemed a lot more interesting than simply lying back and letting T’Laren pleasure him, as much fun as that had seemed at the time.

His motions, his actions, were far from sure or practiced. It took a lot of concentration to remember what he should do, the things that she’d especially liked when they’d been one, and the things she was doing to his body in return didn’t improve his ability to concentrate any. But fundamentally T’Laren seemed to want to lose herself in pleasure, and he didn’t, and that made a good bit of difference. T’Laren seemed to have completely lost the ability to speak for the moment, but every so often he would get a powerful visual or tactile image through their link, something she wanted very much, and he would do his best to give it to her. Except for entering her. He held off on that, although the images coming through the link were demanding it more and more, because as soon as he did that he’d lose most of his ability to focus on her needs. Instead, he used the link against her, feeding the sensations she was giving him right back at her, teasing her body and her mind at the same time.

And then as he was sucking one of her nipples again and rubbing her clitoris with two fingertips, following the guidelines her sensations through the link were giving him, her pleasure suddenly spiked and she convulsed around him, grabbing his hand and using it to pull herself halfway up. The sight of her face and body when she was lost in sensation, when orgasm rippled through her, was both deeply gratifying and incredibly arousing. Who would have thought _he_, of all people, could make a mortal feel so good? He didn’t know what he was doing, he wasn’t well coordinated, he had never been good at any other mortal cooperative activity… but a mindlink helped, a lot.

As her pleasure surged through her, his own need broke free of his control, which to be honest hadn’t been all that good in the first place and he’d never had held off so long if he hadn’t needed to feel like he was in charge even more than he needed to feel her warmth around him. He wanted to be inside her, desperately, and she picked up his need through the link and transmitted enthusiastic, even frantic, consent. Yes. As much as he wanted to be in her now, her need to have him there was even more intense. He slid onto her, and she opened her legs widely, tilting herself up to try to meet him. There was a bit of fumbling – his memory of exactly how they’d done this the last time was pretty vague – and then he was inside her, thrusting, and she convulsed again, his presence inside her apparently extending her orgasmic plateau or possibly even giving her multiple orgasms. He wasn’t sure, and he didn’t quite care anymore, his mind entirely occupied with how good she felt around him and her hands on his back and her lips under his and she was so tight and wet and then any semblance of rational thought fell apart, his mind melting in a sweet wash of pleasure.

Exhaustion hit him as soon as the tension released by his orgasm finished ebbing away. He might not have gone without sleep as long as T’Laren had, but he’d had a pain-wracked night of getting drunk to ease the torture he’d suffered and having it help get him to sleep but not keep him there, and then last night where he hadn’t slept at all. Q was awfully tired, and the whiplash of terror followed by intense pleasure had drained him as much as the sex itself had. He rolled off her and curled up next to her, enjoying the feel of her skin against his in the afterglow again, and fell asleep.

* * *

At some point, long before he actually wanted to wake up, he felt her hands on him again. This time, although the sensations were pleasurable in themselves, it was annoying him more than anything else. What he really needed right now was sleep. Q tried to push T’Laren’s hands away. “Go ‘way. Wanna sleep.”

Her mind pressed against his again, cold fire pushing at his brain and behind it a considerably hotter flame. She still _needed_, she still hungered badly enough that it maddened her. Their last coupling had given her relief for several hours, but the need was back again.

Mentally Q pushed her back, an especially tiring thing to do when he was so sleepy. “Later,” Q mumbled. “I _really_ need sleep.” His voice was slow and slurred with his exhaustion.

And then he felt her mouth on him, kissing and licking her way across his skin, nibbling at his neck. He tried to slap her away, but she only moved, sliding lower on his body. Despite himself Q was waking up; it was impossible to stay asleep when someone’s tongue was drawing circles on your abdomen. “Do you _ever_ get enough?” he asked, still blearily.

And then her mouth was on his penis, and he forgot that he would rather be sleeping. This time Q was much too tired to try to take control; he really did simply lay there and let T’Laren did what she willed with him. Part of him thought that he should probably be disgusted, because the thought of mouth to genital contact was nauseating when you considered what else the genitals were used for, but he was worn out emotionally as much as physically and he really couldn’t muster up any sort of outrage about anything that felt this good. As long as she didn’t expect him to reciprocate. It was her mouth; if she wanted to put filthy things in it that was her lookout.

After everything that had gone before, he felt almost no sense of urgency at all. It took a long time before T’Laren could get him hard again, although the sensations of her mouth and tongue on him and around him and her hands stroking his inner thighs and testicles were wonderful. Q let himself drift on waves of pleasure, not quite falling asleep but not entirely conscious through all of it either. Eventually T’Laren had him as hard as she apparently needed him, and she climbed on top of him and rode him hard, her intensity a bizarre contrast to the lassitude he felt. It wasn’t entirely comfortable; her warmth around him still felt good, but to be honest her hips slamming into his were starting to hurt a bit. He was also starting to feel somewhat used, as if he was nothing to her but a particularly lifelike dildo. It probably wasn’t fair, because he _had_ promised to give her whatever she needed, and obviously she needed this, but he wasn’t participating and he was starting to not even particularly like this and she didn’t seem to care.

Experimentally he reached out and rubbed her clitoris with his thumb, both to help her come faster so she could end this, and because if he actually roused himself enough to _do_ something he felt less used. The response was gratifying, although a little bit painful -- she moaned and moved more frantically, driving herself onto him deeper and pressing into his thumb at the same time. The pounding of her groin against his had graduated to actual pain in his hips and back, but the sight and sound of her so completely lost in the pleasure he was giving her was arousing, re-awakening his interest in the proceedings, and his own desire rising made the pain fade back into the background, almost invisible again. T’Laren’s mind reached out to his, and he was both too worn out and too aroused to resist her. Her self slid into his, overlapping, not fully merging this time, and her heat and her need overwhelmed him. Instinctively he responded, rubbing her harder, faster, his hips moving in time with hers now, his exhaustion forgotten.

Then she fell over the edge, any coherent thought in her mind dissolving in a burst of pleasure, though to be honest there hadn’t been much in the way of coherent thought there before. The sensations she was feeling combined with how her muscles tightening around him made him feel, and seconds later he joined her, release sweeping over him.

* * *

Q became aware that he must have fallen asleep when he felt her hands moving on him again, and he felt cold and leaden. He couldn’t remember what had happened after he came; probably he’d been so exhausted that he’d simply passed out immediately. He desperately wanted to get back to sleep, preferably after wrapping warm blankets around himself, but T’Laren was touching him again and he could feel her need through the link again.

“No,” he mumbled, and tried feebly to push her hand away from his groin. He ached, and he was so very, very tired, and he was starting to feel a little bit raw. Her hands were only irritating him. “Too tired. Lemme sleep.”

She ignored him. He pushed at her harder, and she changed tactics, using her mouth on him again. This time he was so tired he couldn’t respond with pleasure; simply being awake was making his head hurt, and he was oversensitive between his legs, and even her mouth was irritating. Q pushed at her head again. “Stop it… I’m _tired._ I wanna _sleep._” His voice sounded whiny even to him, but he was too tired to care; all he cared about was returning to sweet oblivion, and T’Laren wasn’t letting him doing it.

She wouldn’t stop touching him. He could feel her need, but he was too tired to care. He _had_ to sleep, felt like every moment he spent awake was burning his brain somehow. And her hands and mouth on him couldn’t draw any kind of response out of him; he was used up completely. His penis didn’t even stir under her caresses. It wasn’t that he couldn’t feel it; he could, but what had felt wonderfully pleasant earlier just grated on him now, not exactly painful but not really comfortable either and certainly not pleasurable.

He felt her frustration through the link, and for a moment he was pleased. She understood that he wouldn’t be able to respond until he’d gotten some sleep. He was sure of it. She’d leave him alone now.

And then her hands moved to his temple, and Q was so sluggish with exhaustion it took him moments to react, moments to realize what she was doing. Cold fire pressed against his mind again, and it finally sank in what she was doing. In sudden horror, Q tried to shield himself, tried to force her back out, but his exhaustion made him slow and weak and she simply overwhelmed his defenses, and then her mind was in his and he stopped being.

The unity of their minds was considerably less pleased this time. T’Laren’s frustration and rage at being denied what she needed, the enormity of the need she still felt even after multiple sex acts, Q’s horror at losing his mind again, boiled through both of them. But T’Laren’s mind was dominant now, Q’s mind too exhausted to put up any real resistance, and it was her need that drove their actions. They tried to arouse his body to hardness again, but despite the awful need they both felt, his body was simply done, far too worn out from far too many orgasms to become erect at all. So they used his mouth and fingers on her clitoris and vagina, and when what was left of his consciousness cried out in disgust and tried to pull away from the meld again, they used the raw force of T’Laren’s telepathy and the intensity of her need to dominate that part of them, drowning the fragment of his identity in their shared self and shared need. Sweet pleasure washed through them as they used his body to satisfy hers, making his mouth suck hard on her hard little nub, his fingers drive into her wetness over and over until finally, at long last, her orgasm shuddered through their shared consciousness.

And in that moment, Q got free, mind and body his own once more, and crawled away from T’Laren as far as he could get on the bed, shivering. He was cold, and he was so tired he wanted to die, and he didn’t want T’Laren anywhere near him. She had fallen asleep again, curled up on the bed, and he wanted so badly to be asleep too, but he had to protect himself. In his bleary, exhausted state, it didn’t occur to him that if T’Laren woke up she could just crawl to the other side of the bed to get at him; he just wanted to be somewhere she couldn’t reach out and touch him right now. He felt sick, and betrayed, and used; he was shaking in the aftermath of an orgasm that he hadn’t actually had, his body hurt ferociously, the taste in his mouth was nauseating him, and he thought maybe he should go to the bathroom because he might throw up, but he was too tired to get off the bed. T’Laren was laying on top of the sheets, so he crawled under them, as far as he could go from her without falling off the bed, and pulled them over his head. He yanked a pillow down into his blanket fortress to lay his head on, and another to hug against his body as if curling in a fetal ball around a pillow could actually protect him from anything at all, and pulled the blankets as tightly around him as he could. If he’d been more conscious he’d have realized that the security he felt was a complete illusion, but he only needed enough to convince his half-asleep mind that he was safe enough to yield to sleep, and as soon as he had that much safety the darkness rose up out of the pillow and into his head and washed him away.

* * *

T’Laren awakened, again, when the desire became too intrusive to stay confined to erotic dreams. By instinct she reached out for Q, but he wasn’t there. Reflexively she reached her mind toward him instead, and hit a wall. Q was fully shielded against her.

This was unusual enough to wake her completely. She sat up, and saw him on the other side of the bed, or something that was probably him anyway because he was completely covered by blankets. T’Laren crawled over to him and pulled back the blanket slightly, until she could see his head and part of his arms, which were wrapped tightly around a pillow. His face was as tense and drawn as it had been the day she came in on him after he’d taken sedatives. T’Laren frowned, not quite able to match up his mental shield and obvious tension to what she remembered of the night. She started to reach toward him—

\--and memory flooded back in of the last encounter they’d had. T’Laren recoiled back on the bed, rocking back on her heels, in sudden horror, as she remembered what she’d done.

She had wanted him so badly. Even after they’d been together three times, the need had still throbbed within her. But Q hadn’t responded; he’d kept trying to push her away, telling her to stop. Now that she’d finally satisfied enough of the need to be more or less in her right mind, T’Laren cringed, remembering, because she hadn’t stopped. She had kept touching him, trying to arouse him, and when he didn’t respond at all, she had thought that a full mind meld, a total joining of their minds, would enable Q to feel enough of her desire that he would want it too.

She remembered Q’s sudden terror as she felt him realize what she intended, remembered him trying to throw up mental shields in a sudden panic, but although he had actually turned out to be remarkably adept with his mind when he was wide awake, in his exhausted state he’d been no match for her. She’d forced a joining of minds on him, and drowned out any resistance with her need. And when his body _still_ couldn’t respond – apparently human men simply didn’t physically have the stamina Vulcans did, which she supposed shouldn’t have surprised her – she had taken what she needed from him a different way, directing their joined mind so that Q would perform oral sex on her and use his fingers inside her. Q had tried to resist again, the part of their joined self that was his mind reacting with utter disgust to the thought of putting his mouth anywhere near anyone’s genitals, but she’d needed him and he couldn’t give it to her the other way so she’d overridden him. Instead of a perfect melding of minds, their joining had been more T’Laren controlling Q’s mind, and through his mind his body, and neither Q’s fear and disgust nor her own personal ethics had even raised a warning flag in her mind about it.

She had raped him. Both physically and mentally. He had consented to give her what she needed, she dimly remembered that, and he’d willingly joined with her and then willingly had sex with her three times, but the last time he hadn’t consented – he had told her to stop, he had tried to push her away, he had tried to resist the mindmeld and he’d been horrified and disgusted at what she’d wanted him to do, so she’d mind-controlled him into doing it anyway.

She wrapped her arms around her breasts and crumpled in on herself, folding into as tight a ball as she could. Tears welled in her eyes, and a sob forced its way out of her throat, and there was no question of using discipline to control herself, not now. She didn’t even deserve to be controlled. The thing she had most feared doing, the thing she had had Q lock her in a closet to prevent and had endured an eternity of agonizing need instead, and she had done it anyway. She remembered saying over and over “I will not _harm_ you,” a mantra that meant she refused to do it, the way “There is no pain” meant to a Vulcan “I won’t let myself feel pain”, but she hadn’t even meant harm, generically. She’d meant she refused to rape him, though she hadn’t been able to bring herself to use that word. And then she’d done it _anyway._

T’Laren half-fell, half-laid herself down on the bed, still curled as tightly as she could, and sobbed brokenly. He should have let her die. But it wasn’t his fault – he’d done the noble thing, the heroic thing, just as she’d thought he would if anyone actually told him what was at stake, which of course the Ferengi had, and she still wanted to kill them all for this. She should have found a way to kill herself so Q couldn’t have let her out and she couldn’t have raped him. She should have foreseen that the Ferengi would tell him; she _had_ foreseen that if he’d known the truth he would sacrifice himself to her, to save her life, and she should have realized that the Ferengi wouldn’t leave such a weakness unexploited. But it wasn’t the Ferengi that had forced a mind-meld on him and drowned out the protestations and fears of his mind and used him for sexual gratification when he was too exhausted to get any pleasure from it himself. _She_ had done that. Ultimately there was no one to blame but herself.

And the horrible thing was that, although her mind was her own again, the need still raged through her; it was weaker now, more the levels that had driven her to have sex with random human men that she found in bars on shore leave on various planets, because Soram wouldn’t have sex with her at all outside his Time, rather than the level that had simply destroyed her will and rationality and ethics and left her barely conscious, a mindless bundle of nerves. It was weak enough that she could control herself now; she wasn’t going to rape him again. But she still _wanted_ him, and that was an awful thing to feel after what she’d done. How dare she still want him under these circumstances? How dare she remember the pleasure he’d given her before, and the wonderful release she had finally felt, when she’d obtained at least one of those releases against his will?

She cried, and cried, and wished she were dead, but Vulcans didn’t actually really have the ability to stop their own hearts any more than Q really did. Dying, apparently, wasn’t an option, now that Q had given her enough to keep the need from killing her. Sooner or later she was going to have to face him, when he woke up, but he would hate her and she would deserve it.

* * *

Q dearly wished he was not awake. Everything hurt, horribly. Unfortunately he needed to use the bathroom too badly to stay blissfully unconscious, and by the time he had staggered to the bathroom, dragging the blanket with him so he could at least avoid giving the Ferengi _more_ of a free show than they’d already had, he was in far too much pain to be able to get back to sleep. His head pounded, he was so thirsty his tongue felt like cardboard, and although he dimly recalled having gone to the bathroom at some point during the earlier activities, his bladder still felt like it might burst.

That taken care of, he needed clothes. When he’d taken everything out of his closet to make room for T’Laren, he’d piled the clothes in the corner of his bedroom. He stumbled back into the bedroom from the bathroom and started rummaging through the pile, one-handed since he needed the other hand to hold up the blanket.

“Q,” T’Laren said, her voice hoarse enough that it was almost a whisper. Q was startled; he hadn’t actually heard her voice in quite some time. She was kneeling on the bed, naked, half-covered in another of the blankets. “I… I am deeply sorry… I know what I—“

“Shut up,” Q said, more tiredly than irritably, though what he felt was mostly irritation. “I’m not interested in hearing it.”

“I… I’m sorry…”

“And stop apologizing for apologizing. I know what you want to say and I don’t care. I don’t really want to hear it now. So shut up.”

He found what he was looking for and dragged it to the bathroom with him. There honestly wasn’t much point to this – if there were monitors in the bedroom, the Ferengi had seen pretty much everything there was to see, and besides, he’d walked around without his clothes on in the main room after the bugs incident – but he felt a profound need for sartorial armor at the moment. Especially because he looked like death only slightly warmed over. He took a shower, got dressed in one of his more formidable outfits, and took twenty minutes to apply makeup, and even then he thought he still looked awful. He’d fallen out of the habit of being able to put on an unassailable front when he was in considerable pain, since pain had stopped being his default state. Q tried a few poses in front of the mirror, putting on different expressions until he had one he thought hid his suffering reasonably well.

He didn’t even go back in the bedroom, leaving the bathroom directly through the door to the main suite. There was food on the table – some sandwiches, two glasses of wine, candles that had obviously burned down, and a basket of heart-shaped cookies. Someone undoubtedly thought they were being hilarious. He took a small bite of all of the sandwiches, including the ones with no meat in them, to check for the grated aspirin taste, but it wasn’t there anymore, nor was it in the cookies. Under the circumstances Q wasn’t going to trust alcohol, or even synthehol, for any reason. He returned to the bathroom, dumped the wine in the sink, rinsed the glasses and filled them both with cold water. Then he stalked over to the bedroom and walked in.

T’Laren was curled up on the bed, crying softly. She looked up as he entered. “I don’t know how long it is since you ate real food, but I checked the meal they left for you, and miraculously they don’t appear to have poisoned it,” he said shortly. “Get some clothes on and come eat something.”

It had been something like 9 am when he’d left the suite yesterday, and he’d returned maybe an hour later. It was now 4 am, which was an utterly ridiculous time to have to be awake. How long _had_ everything taken… yesterday, or earlier today, or whatever he was going to call it? He hadn’t been checking the time. Right now he wasn’t actually genuinely tired, per se; he ached horribly, he was extremely irritable, but he didn’t feel any particular desire to go back to sleep, so eventually he must have gotten enough sleep. But that made it close to 20 hours since he’d last eaten, and before that, it had been a day and a half without food. He was starving, which probably wasn’t helping his mood any. There were six sandwiches; Q devoured the three with meat, even though one was made with bologna and he hated bologna and there was mayonnaise, which he also hated, on all of them. He then ate half the cookies, and was eyeing one of T’Laren’s less unpleasant tasting sandwiches when she came in.

She hadn’t brushed her hair or washed her face, her eyes were bloodshot bright green and sat in sockets surrounded by greenish-yellow markings under her eyes, and the nightgown she was wearing looked as rumpled as if it had been sitting in a suitcase for days, which of course it had been. She walked stiffly, and her face had no expression as she made her way to the table without ever actually looking at him.

Q got up. He was done with his food, and he didn’t feel like sitting with T’Laren right now. “After you eat, take a shower. You look like targ feces.” He returned to the bedroom because there was nowhere in the main suite to go to avoid T’Laren if she was sitting out there.

The bedroom stank. He ripped all the sheets off the bed and threw them in the bathtub. This reminded him that if he ever wanted to use his closet again, it would probably need to be cleaned up as well, so he went back out into the main room, ostentatiously ignoring T’Laren, and checked the closet. It reeked, but not of urine or feces; she hadn’t even used the urn he left for her for the purpose. The smell was more like sweat, and musk – possibly, literally musk, or the Vulcan equivalent thereof. Who knew what sort of pheromones she’d been putting out that his human physiology hadn’t noticed or responded to?

“When you’re done eating, clean up the bedsheets, since you’re the one who knows how to do it with the primitive solvents the Ferengi gave us. And see if you can get the smell out of this closet. I’m not going to be able to put my clothes back in it for a month at this rate.”

T’Laren nodded mutely. The fact that she wouldn’t talk normally, and that she looked horrible and couldn’t even be bothered to put herself together to look presentable before showing herself, irritated him enormously. “What, have you permanently lost the power of speech?”

“You asked me to be quiet,” she whispered.

“No, I told you to shut up, and I was talking about your idiotic need to apologize.” He stalked over to her. “Instead we can talk about your distressing lack of personal hygiene, your poor eating habits – what are you, a rabbit? Quit _nibbling_ on your sandwich and _eat_ it. You look like you haven’t eaten in a week, and since I think that’s probably about accurate, _eat_ something.”

“I’m not hungry,” she said, still whispering.

“I don’t care if you’re hungry or not! You didn’t exactly care if—” He cut himself off before he said, or thought, anything more on that subject. “I did not undergo _great_ personal distress to save your miserable little life just so you could starve yourself to death. _Eat_.”

To his shock, tears welled in her eyes. She ducked her head rapidly, but not before he saw them.

“Oh, please! You call yourself a Vulcan? Are you going to cry every time I insult you? Because if you’re going to be that unutterably tedious maybe I _should_ just have let you die.”

“You should have,” she said dully, head still lowered, not looking at him.

“No, I _shouldn’t_ have, and you win the all expenses paid, star-studded, gold latinum plated, three year vacation on the Pakled homeworld for your _unutterable, mind-numbing, indescribable_ stupidity in not telling me what was _wrong_ with you until it was almost too damn late! You obtuse, pathetic misuse of Vulcan protoplasm, _why_ did you think I would prefer to see you _die_? And I don’t want to discuss this! Eat your short-sighted, bleeding-heart excuse for a meal and go clean yourself up! And the bedsheets!”

She pushed the food away and ran for the bathroom. Q rolled his eyes. “And learn how to act like a Vulcan while you’re in there! If you’re going to cry every time I say anything to you I’m just going to have to get meaner until you toughen up!”

When she was gone, he propped himself against the wall with one hand, leaning against it, and breathed, hard. The rage he felt was totally out of proportion to what she was actually doing, but he’d been doing so well at not thinking about why that was so far, it was a shame to break the streak. He dearly wished the Ferengi would actually show up; right now he could actually use the distraction of having work to do. But it was far too early; they weren’t likely to make an appearance for another four hours or so.

Of course he didn’t really _want_ to deal with the Ferengi, either. As much as T’Laren’s presence upset him, the thought of actually doing anything for Yalit’s benefit filled him with helpless fury. But he didn't really have a choice in the matter; between the neurowhip and what they'd proven themselves willing to do to T'Laren, he had to do what Yalit wanted, and at least working would get him away from T'Laren.

Besides, he wanted to point out to Yalit how she'd just screwed herself over. She was angry that he'd tried to destroy her reputation? Exactly what did she probably think sexually assaulting a pair of Federation citizens would do? If it got out what she'd done, she'd be ruined. Kidnapping was one thing; the Ferengi kidnapped people all the time, and since their government didn't seem to think it was illegal and the Federation wasn't willing to go to war over a kidnapping or two as long as the victims were eventually returned unharmed, nothing was generally done about it. The Federation didn’t go to war over or even get particularly upset about financial issues, and kidnapping for ransom fell in that category. But sexual assault was something else entirely, and by Federation law, using drugs to compel a person into sexual acts was sexual assault, and so was blackmailing a person into sexual acts by threatening the life of someone they cared for, and it didn’t matter in either case whether the sex acts were performed with the perpetrator or another party. Prostitution was not illegal in the Federation, but trafficking was; forcing, blackmailing or otherwise compelling a person to have sex with a third party was considered rape, even under circumstances where the third party’s acts _weren’t_ – for instance, if the coerced person was also being coerced into pretending that they were acting of their own free will, and therefore the third party didn’t know the sex was coerced, the third party who actually _had_ sex with the coerced person wasn’t a rapist, but the one responsible for the coercion _was._ Q had actually looked into Federation law regarding this in detail after the incident with Amy Frasier – which had been very upsetting to him at the time, because the law had plainly stated that she had assaulted him and yet Security’s laughing at the matter had made it quite clear to him that he couldn’t possibly get justice, and he’d thought the Federation was more advanced than to have laws on the books they’d just laugh at. Now Q thought he understood a bit better why they’d laughed, and why T’Laren had told him that what Amy had done to him hadn’t been sexual assault. He still thought she should have been punished for it in _some_ way, but it turned out there was an enormous difference between someone doing something to you that you wanted badly enough that you couldn’t bring yourself to make them stop even though you knew it was a terrible idea and you were terrified of the potential consequences, and someone doing something to you that you genuinely didn’t want, at all, but you _couldn’t_ make them stop even when you tried.

He needed to find out how Federation law handled Vulcans and their weird sex-or-die compulsions. As angry as he was with T’Laren right now, he didn’t want to see her prosecuted or harassed for what had happened; he wanted to be able to charge Yalit and her goons with rape for what they’d done to both him and T’Laren, but he didn’t want T’Laren branded a rapist, although technically, from the pure facts of the case, she was. No. His breathing grew harsh and ragged. He didn’t want to think about that.

Q walked over to the couch and sat down hard on it. He stared at the wall, eyes unfocused, not really looking at anything. This wasn’t T’Laren’s fault. Right now he hated her for it and wanted her to suffer as much as she’d hurt him, which was turning out to be much easier than he liked because she seemed to be more than willing to torture herself for it, and really, he’d have preferred it if she’d actually put up some resistance or fought back instead of blaming herself and crying because it wasn’t satisfying at all to torment someone who was so broken already, but he couldn’t exactly soften and offer her comfort or something asinine like that under the circumstances. The truth was, though, that he _knew_ it wasn’t her fault. She hadn’t asked to be drugged; she’d _tried_ to stop herself, to the extent of lying to him about the severity and nature of her problem and getting him to lock her in a closet. He knew, because he’d been part of her mind at the time, how completely disconnected from her own sense of morality and in fact her entire rational mind she’d been when she’d invaded his mind, that last time. He knew that she hadn’t been capable of thinking about anything except what she needed, and that he was just lucky that that last time had been enough for her rationality to return. None of it was really her fault.

Of course, _his_ rationality was on shaky ground right now. He might know intellectually it wasn’t her fault, but she’d still held him down and taken over his mind against his will, and the fact that this hadn’t resulted in his destruction the way it would have if he’d been Q only meant that he was alive and free to remember it. He’d probably get around to forgiving her… eventually. But he wasn’t capable of that right now, and he didn’t really want to be. Didn’t he have the right to be angry? Who could possibly blame him for being enraged with her right now?

Apparently, not even T’Laren herself. Because he could still hear her sobbing in the other room, and he had a dim, faraway sense of a crushing guilt and self-hatred that he could easily tell wasn’t his own. Which meant they were still linked, and dammit, he was angry about that too. Was he going to have to go around for the rest of his life with her mind imposing on him, able to invade his any time she felt like it?

Experimentally he tried shielding himself the way he would have from unwanted intrusion by another Q. To his surprise, it worked. The dim sense he had of someone else’s emotions went away completely. That cheered him up a bit, though not enough to actually overcome the anger he felt. At least there was _something_ he could do to protect himself telepathically, even in this reduced state. He hadn’t been able to shield against tr’Sahlassiu for very long, but tr’Sahlassiu had been trying to break him, and had been using raw power against him; T’Laren wasn’t trying to invade his mind, at least not right now, and as annoying as he found it to have any kind of semi-permanent link, if he could close the link when he wanted to it became a lot less annoying. He tried letting down his shields again, wondering if in fact he had successfully closed the link or if he’d just blocked it. When his shields came down, the sense of T’Laren’s mind came back. So the link was still there, but he could control whether she could read anything through it or not.

Idly he wondered if he could do what he could have done when he was a Q, and put up shields that he himself could still read others through. Not that he actually _wanted_ to be reading T’Laren’s mind on a regular basis, but if he could see her and she couldn’t see him, it would go a long way toward restoring a power balance that he felt had tilted far too much in her favor since she’d used her telepathy against him. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure that mortal minds actually had enough layers to pull that one off; he used to use it on other Q by simultaneously distracting them with something shiny to disrupt their concentration while leaving a false façade of openness up on his own mind, creating the superficial impression that he was open, and he wasn’t actually sure that there was enough of him left in this mortal state that he could put up a convincing impression of being open when he was in fact closed. Humans could only think of one thing at a time, maybe two at _best_, and Q had found that while he could control his body language and tone of voice the way that he could create false fronts as a Q, when he’d been up against tr’Sahlassiu and the Romulan had gotten through his outer shields, he’d had nothing left, not even the defenses he’d have had if they’d been verbalizing.

Still, it was an interesting idea, so he practiced, trying to actively read T’Laren’s mind through the link while still keeping his own mind closed to her. It was impossible to tell if it was working, though, because T’Laren was so distracted by her grief and guilt, and to be completely honest by the irritatingly powerful sexual desires she was _still_ suffering from, which made it very uncomfortable for him to read her mind and kept her from noticing what he was doing, so he couldn’t read from her whether she _could_ read him or not.

The sandwiches were still sitting there. This made him irrationally angry again, and he stomped to the bedroom and stuck his head in. "Hey, are you ever going to eat anything ever again? Because if you're planning to starve yourself to death, let me know so I can have your sandwiches, as I for one am hungry enough to eat one of the Ferengi if we just had an oven to cook them in."

"Go ahead and eat them," T'Laren said dully. "I'm not hungry."

"And you've been without food how long? Eat the sandwiches. How do you expect to get your strength back if you never eat again?"

She looked down at the floor. "It doesn't matter," she whispered.

"Oh, it most certainly does." He stalked over to the bed she was sitting on and stood over her, looming into her personal space. "You see, under most circumstances your choice of personal self-destruction would be none of my business. But under most circumstances, I wouldn't have undergone an exceedingly distressing experience, at _your_ hands, for the ostensible purpose of saving your life. So I believe that right now, I have the right to tell you to _eat_ your benighted sandwiches, or you will be effectively declaring that my sacrifice for your sake meant _nothing _to you. Is that _actually _what you want to say to me?"

T’Laren shook her head mutely.

“Great. _Wonderful._ Now get out there and go eat your sandwiches.”

She got up and went back to the main room. The bed had been remade; apparently she had, in fact, gone and washed the bedsheets, although she clearly hadn’t taken a shower to clean herself up. Q would have flopped onto it except that he was wearing full formal dress and his clothing didn’t have enough give to it to do so comfortably, and besides, everything ached.

There was still nothing to do. It was too close to when the Ferengi were expected with breakfast to go back to sleep, and he doubted he could anyway, but he didn’t have any more entertainment available than he had the night he’d had to lock T’Laren up. He had meant to leave T’Laren alone to eat her sandwiches, but he was too damn bored. Q went back out to the main room, where T’Laren was listlessly nibbling at her sandwich.

“How long are you going to be like this?” Q demanded.

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice hoarse, but at least she wasn’t crying anymore. “It’s never been brought on by a drug before.”

“Well, how long is it before your appetite comes back, at least? Usually?”

“It’s… not normally like this.”

“Yes, we’re both clear on that concept. I want to know what we can _possibly_ expect, not chapter and verse of exactly what’s going to happen to you now.”

She shook her head. “It’s not… _over_, Q. Usually… it was… two or three days, together. And then we would eat, and then… spend more time together, and… there was never a part where I was in it but I couldn’t be with him… so this time is completely different. I don’t know if my appetite will return soon, or in a few days… or ever.”

He had gone cold when she said it wasn’t over. “You don’t… are you going to be all right? You’re not going to die now, right?”

“I think so, yes. But… I don’t know. It’s never been a drug. And it’s never been just _me_ – Soram was always as affected as I was. You can’t… you aren’t Vulcan. Your limits… are human limits.”

Q didn’t know whether to be offended at the implied insult to his endurance, or simply appalled that Vulcans would typically spend two or three days doing nothing but taking naps and having sex under normal circumstances. He chose not to address the issue. “Well, you look horrible. I could guess you’ve lost as much as five kilos over the past few days. If you’re actually biologically able to digest your food at this point, I _strongly_ suggest you eat.”

She looked up with an expression of utter desolation on her face. “Why do you care?” she whispered.

“Excuse me?”

“After what I did to you, why do you care if I live or die?”

Q shrugged. “You have no idea how boring it was in here when you lost your ability to converse. Besides, I can’t very well get adequate revenge on you if you die, can I?”

“Revenge?”

“Oh yes.” Q seated himself across the table from her and leaned forward. “I have not made your life _nearly_ enough a living hell to pay you back. You’re worthless to me if all you do is sit there and cry and starve yourself to death. Make yourself back into a worthy opponent so I don’t have to feel like I’m beating up someone helpless when I crush you completely.”

She stared at him for several seconds. “I don’t want to fight you,” she said softly. “Whatever you want to do to me, I deserve.”

“Oh, well, I’m glad we’re both in agreement about that, but that doesn’t change the fact that if you just sit there and take it, it’s no fun for me. Give me some sport; fight back enough to make it interesting.” A blackly bitter smile spread across his face. “After all, I gave _you_ that much.”

At her sudden stricken look, he got up and walked away from her. He was going to say something that he never wanted to say to her, and he most especially didn’t want to say in front of the Ferengi, if he kept talking to her.

* * *

It wasn’t long after that that the Ferengi finally showed up. There were two of them, both ones he’d seen before, and they giggled and leered. “Nice show there, hyuu-mon,” one of them said. “But maybe you should’ve let us take a turn after she wore you out. It was pretty clear there she needed more man than _you_.”

His face burned, but aside from the involuntary response he couldn’t control, he didn’t let his humiliation show. “How unfortunate for her that there weren’t any besides me aboard this ship who could meet her… _exacting_… specifications, then.”

The other one laughed, a fast hyena-like giggle that seemed to be covering anger. “I’m sure we could have met her needs just as well as you could.”

Q smiled maliciously. “I think that you couldn’t have. Vulcans require that their partners have souls.”

The one who had just spoken laughed again. “That’s funny! Most women just require money and a big dick!”

“Maybe you don’t approve of our morals, but she’d have taken any man by the end, whether you think we’re nice guys or not,” the first one said.

“Oh, you misunderstand. I didn’t say you have no souls as some kind of hyperbolic commentary on your morals or lack thereof. I said you have no souls because you don’t. No psionic ability, no immortal personality core to survive after your physical death. It’s why every religion in the universe but yours emphasizes how no material goods will follow the deceased into the afterlife, but you’ve spun elaborate fantasies of wishful thinking about how all the _things_ you acquire in your worldly existence will somehow follow you after you die.” He shook his head, as if saddened by their lack of wisdom. “As a former immortal being of psionic energy, I have to tell you that your Great River is purely imaginary. Entities of pure psionic energy have no need for material goods; when most mortals die, their psionic cores, what some would call ‘souls’, are freed of their bodies and have no material wants or desires at all. There’s no means for any material substance to cross over into the realm of psionic energy until a species becomes powerful enough to convert at will, like mine.”

“What are you talking about?” the first one asked.

“I’m simply explaining that because you have no psionic ability, you’re confined to this material existence. If T’Laren or I were to die, we would continue on to an afterlife, because we have psionic cores animating our bodies, but you’re nothing but a body, similar to an animal. The amazing thing is that you actually manage to mimic full sentience without a soul, but sadly, it’s an empty achievement. When you die, you die forever. You don’t get an afterlife.” He shrugged. “Sorry about that.”

“That’s not _true._ When Ferengi die, we become part of the Great Material Continuum—“

“Yeah, about that? It doesn’t exist. Sorry. There _is_ a continuity of all matter, of course, but it’s called ‘the universe’ and you’re already a part of it. There’s no higher dimension of matter, no unifying principle, no Great River of material goods flowing through a different aspect of space-time. So, you know, go ahead and mindlessly pursue material profit. What you get for yourself in this life is all you get.”

“We aren’t even talking about souls!” the second one said. “We’re talking about fucking your woman!”

“She’s not my woman. By the standards of her culture I get the distinct impression that I’m her man, or at least she thinks so. But that’s exactly what I’m talking about. She needs a man with a _soul_, or it doesn’t work for her. I’m sure you knew the Vulcans are telepaths?”

“Yes…” the second said warily.

“Well, they need someone they can mind-link with, and you’re an animal that can talk, so you haven’t got a mind. Well, not a mind by Vulcan standards, anyway. She’d consider sleeping with you bestiality. See, I can touch her mind, and you can’t. You’re a soulless shell, whereas I am a real person, by the standards that matter. So I’ve got what she needs, and you don’t. I may not be able to go all night, but by Vulcan standards you can’t go at all, so unfortunately for T’Laren she was stuck with me.”

T’Laren had apparently been listening to the conversation, and had wandered over to stand behind Q as he spoke, but she hadn’t said anything the whole time that Q had been spinning his line of extra grade bullshit about the Ferengi not having souls… in fact the Ferengi did most certainly have minds _and_ psionic presences; it was the structure of their brains that made them telepathically incompatible with most other humanoid species, not a lack of psionic presence, but Q was guessing that these ones didn’t know that.

“I chose you,” T’Laren said abruptly.

“What?” Q half turned.

She didn’t look at him. She was glaring at the Ferengi. “Q is only half correct. It is true that you lack what I need in a man, all of you. What Q does not realize is that I did not simply accept him because he was the only available choice; I would be compelled to kill any man who touched me if I did not want him. No other man, Vulcan, human, Ferengi or any other, could have satisfied me. I chose _him_.” She put her hand on Q’s arm, briefly because he flinched slightly at her touch. “I will kill any other man who tries to have me. If any man were to successfully overpower me and force me, I would not be able to rest until I had found a way to kill him. I am not rational on the matter when I am influenced by your drug. I cannot be persuaded, I cannot be blackmailed, I cannot even voluntarily choose to go with one of you for some sort of gain. Until this drug is out of my system, I will kill any man who touches me but Q, or I will die trying. Do you understand?”

They had both gone pale, and they nodded frantically. Q watched them, but kept sneaking glances at T’Laren out of the side of his vision. When she’d touched him, the link had opened again, and before he’d had a chance to put his shields back up, he sensed that she was telling the truth – that she actually meant that she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from trying to kill anyone who tried to rape her, and even more bizarrely, that she meant what she said about choosing him specifically. Which made no sense, because T’Laren had made it very clear in the past that she didn’t want him, and it didn’t make any sense for her to have changed her mind so radically. Perhaps it was some kind of chemical change in her brain brought on by the drug, or perhaps she’d subconsciously picked him because he was, in fact, the only game in town under the circumstances.

One of the two Ferengi shoved their bowls of breakfast at them unceremoniously. "Eat up quick, hyuu-mon," he said. "The Lady Yalit wants to see you in engineering as soon as possible."

"Yeah, fine," Q grumbled, taking one of the bowls and handing it to T'Laren, then taking the other.

They backed out hurriedly. One of the two yelled, "Good luck with her, hyuu-mon!"

"Better you than us!" the other called, and they laughed uproariously as the door closed.

When they were gone, Q turned to T’Laren. “What do you mean, you ‘chose’ me? You didn’t exactly have a plethora of choices.”

“I chose you,” she said again.

“Yes, you _said_ that. What does that mean? Choice in the absence of choices is pretty meaningless.”

She shook her head. “I cannot discuss it.”

“You… _what?_ We just had _sex_ in front of the monitors _you_ insisted on putting in our bedroom, multiple times, providing no doubt hours of free entertainment for our captors, and there’s something you can’t _discuss_ with me? Didn’t your not discussing things with me result in you nearly getting _killed_ because you couldn’t be bothered to tell me that if you didn’t have sex you’d die?”

T’Laren walked over to the table with the bowl of food. “There are two men in the universe I would have embraced at that time. Any other, I would have killed, or tried, and the blood lust might have been all the satisfaction I required. Had I killed any of the Ferengi, I might never have needed to touch you. But there were only two men who could have touched me. You, and Tris. Tris was not here, you were, but that isn’t why I made the choice.” She looked at him. “There is no logic to choosing. Rationally, yes, I should have chosen you because you were the only one here, but if you hadn’t been here and a human man, or Vulcan man, I didn’t know had been, I still would have chosen you, and died or killed for it. And there is no logic to that. There are a thousand reasons I should never have chosen you, and you know them because I told them to you, or because we experienced them last night, but I chose you anyway. I am… I am sorry I chose you, because I would rather have died than hurt you and if I hadn’t chosen you, you would have never imposed yourself on me. I would have let you be, and died.”

“Or you’d have tried to kill me.”

“Only men who try to rape me. Or who look at me with lust, because they’re imagining raping me. If I hadn’t wanted you, and you had offered, I would have said no. And you would not have pushed yourself on me if I had, because you didn’t want _me_. So no, I would not have tried to kill you.”

He couldn’t deal with this right now. It was sounding suspiciously like she was saying she had wanted him specifically, _before_ the drugs, and he was pretty sure that couldn’t be true. Unless she’d lied about it before. Or unless it was the drugs, the simulated _pon farr_, that had kicked her libido into gear enough that she could fall in lust with him, but why would she do that when she didn’t even think he was attractive? Well, okay, she’d said he was attractive in a way she didn’t find sexually interesting, like a work of art or a waterfall or something, but he’d always thought she’d just been trying to spare his feelings. And in any case he couldn’t deal with it right now. She’d said it wasn’t over, and now she was saying she had wanted him _before_ this, or something, and the thought of her still being sexually interested in him right now filled him with both dread and a wholly unwanted guilty excitement. He _shouldn’t_ enjoy the thought of her wanting him, he _shouldn’t_ feel excitement, or worse, the warm burn of arousal, because that last time had been horrible and he had felt totally betrayed and he was still angry at her… and the fact that before that, it had felt really good, shouldn’t matter, not after what she did. If he went around forgiving people who did things like that to him, he’d be a doormat.

“Whatever.” The food wasn’t appetizing at all, some sort of gloppy oatmeal thing, but if he didn’t eat he couldn’t very well harangue her into eating hers, and besides he was still very hungry. He sat on the couch, well away from her, and ate the oatmeal as fast as he could without getting it all over himself. “Eat your food, T’Laren.”

“It’s true,” she said. “You were not a convenience, Q. Believe anything else of me, but at least you must believe that.”

“If you try to tell me you’re in love with me, I _will_ vomit. Just be quiet and eat.”

The Ferengi came for him moments after he was done eating, as if they’d been hovering around waiting. Just as well. He didn’t want to be having this discussion with T’Laren right now.

* * *

“You really did it!” Yalit said to him with malicious cheer as he entered engineering. “Didn't think you had it in you, honestly, but you did it. How does it feel to commit bestiality?” She sniggered. “You seemed to like it just fine from what I could see.”

Q took a deep breath. “Is there something I should know about you? Something you’re not telling me? You seem positively obsessed with the details of my sex life. Some sort of prurient interest in me?”

She snorted. “You’ve got no lobes and there’s no meat on your bones. If I wanted to fuck you, it’d only be because it’s so sweet to hear you cry and beg, not because I actually wanted your cock.”

“Oh, right, I forgot. You’re incapable of any kind of sexual desire that doesn’t involve causing pain. I’m sure if it were biologically possible, you’d be just as much a rapist as your offspring seem to want to be.”

She shrugged. “You can’t tell me that someone who’s famous for tormenting half the species in the galaxy can’t understand the attraction of making people suffer. The only reason hurting people doesn’t get you hard is that energy beings don’t have cocks and you don’t have the power to do anything more than make smart-ass remarks now that you’re human.”

“And the entire concept of making people suffer pain during _sex_ is not just disgusting, it misses the entire point of the ritual. When I had my powers and engaged in pleasure-sharing activities with my fellow Q, I could make them beg because they were desperate for more, not because they wanted me to stop.”

“Most of the men I’ve been with begged me for more, too.”

“So you took advantage of perverts with miswired brains to increase your personal power and satisfy your lust for other people’s pain. Good work if you can get it, I suppose.”

“It’s just what I’d expect from a human from the Federation to judge other people’s sex lives and tell people who’re getting some harmless enjoyment that they’re perverts, but really, I thought some sort of godlike being would be more advanced than that. Is that why they threw you out?”

“You hit me three times with a neurowhip! I was in agony for the whole day! Then you drugged my friend so she’d need someone to have sex with her, and nearly killed her! How is that harmless enjoyment?”

“It’s not.” Yalit’s smile came back, twice as nasty as before. “It’s what you deserve for trying to ruin my reputation, belittling me, insulting me, and lying to me.”

“Oh really.” Q’s own smile matched Yalit’s for cold malice. “So explain to me why what you did to me to punish me for ‘trying to ruin your reputation’ was something that was _guaranteed_ to destroy your reputation, what little of it you might have had. See, as soon as the Federation finds out that you drugged a Vulcan woman to force her into sex, you will be branded a common criminal. A rapist, a trafficker, the lowest of the low. They’d have looked the other way about the kidnapping itself, but now that you’ve committed sexual assault, your reputation is _ruined._”

“I’m not worried about it.”

“You should be. Even if you force the Federation to grant you a pardon, it’ll _still_ get all over that you did it in the first place, and your reputation as a scientist and inventor will be gone. And I wouldn’t be so sure they’ll _give_ you a pardon. They have literally hundreds of different legal entities that could possibly charge you with a crime for what you’ve done to Federation citizens, so even if one such gives you a pardon they can come after you with another, and I wouldn’t expect your ability to blackmail high-ranking Ferengi masochists to save you this time; if you’re blackmailing them, they’d probably be delighted to see you disappear into the Federation penal system where you’ll never be heard from on Ferenginar again.”

“I _said_, I’m not worried about it. Why don’t you leave worrying about my reputation up to me?” She motioned with her head into engineering. “Now, we’ve got work to do. In two days we’ll be at the Bolian homeworld, where we can just drop your friend off. If you want the Federation to be invited to bid on _you_, I want a transwarp test that works before then.”

Q blinked. “The Bolian homeworld? We were nowhere near there.”

“Until we went into transwarp a couple of times. Our tests might’ve been short, but they got us some distance. You want to argue with me, or you want to work toward earning your freedom back?”

Put like that, it was obvious what he needed to do. Annoyed, because he’d really wanted to get more of a reaction than that to what he’d thought was a sure-fire zinger, Q walked deep into the engineering room to get to work.

But the Bolian homeworld thing nagged at him, even as he explained the documentation he’d created to Yalit and her sons. Early in his time as a human, Q had gotten horribly frustrated with the fact that he didn’t know where anything was or how it related to each other in terms of how a human could perceive the universe; of course he knew where all the worlds of the Federation were, and more, and in fact probably had a better idea of what was on most of the planets in the galaxy than anyone else did. But he kept running into problems where he’d forget that some world he’d visited many times was deep in the Delta or Gamma Quadrants and nowhere near anywhere humans could get to, or that the transit time between Earth and, say, Betazed, was several days and not instantaneous, or that there were some worlds the Federation simply couldn’t go anywhere near because of that pesky Romulan Neutral Zone that formed a sphere around Romulan space and cut off most of the Beta Quadrant from Federation exploration unless Starfleet wanted to send a ship out _around_ Romulan space, which would apparently take a year and a half. It made him look stupid, when he forgot things that Federation citizens took for granted as basic facts everyone knew. So he had spent a lot of time with star maps, memorizing where the worlds he knew about actually were in relation to each other rather than in relation to the nodes of the Continuum, and cursing himself for not having been more careful when he picked out what memories he was going to bring with him into his human existence. Why did he even _need_ to remember how anything related to nodes in the Continuum anyway? He wasn’t ever going back there with his primitive human brain.

There was no way they could be anywhere near the Bolian homeworld. Q knew exactly how fast warp-equivalent 13 was, _Ketaya_’s top speed; he knew how much space _Ketaya_ could have crossed at top regular warp speed since they were taken captive; he knew where the Abister singularity was in relation to the rest of Federation space, including the Bolian homeworld; and he knew there was no way they could possibly be two days away from the Bolian homeworld. But why would Yalit even bother saying something like that if it wasn’t true? What did she gain by lying to him?

It hit him then in a cold wash of horror, while he was in the middle of writing out the corrected diagrams for part of the process he had described in his handwritten and hand-encrypted documentation. He stopped for a moment, staring at the wall in absolute horror, before bending his head back down and pretending to work so Yalit couldn’t see his expression.

Yalit wasn’t afraid of what would happen to her reputation once it got out that she had kidnapped and sexually assaulted Federation citizens because Yalit had no intention of releasing either of them back to the Federation.

All she had to do was beam T’Laren into outer space and claim she’d been beamed to a planet. Or, since Q could demand to talk to T’Laren to confirm that she was all right, beam her into a holodeck set up to look like the Bolian homeworld, have her confirm that she was safe, and then kill her as soon as _Ketaya_ was out of the area and Q couldn’t check anymore. Or, since Ferengi weren’t usually big on killing possibly valuable merchandise, maybe they would sell her to slavers. It could be true that Yalit wasn’t planning on going anywhere near the Romulan Neutral Zone, but selling T’Laren to traders who _were_ going there, who could then re-sell her to the Romulan Empire as a captive Vulcan breeder to create telepathic spies with, was entirely within the realm of possibility. And if that were the case, then Yalit had absolutely no intention of ever ransoming him back to the Federation, either. Someone who wanted to kill him would be the safest bet; he’d have given her transwarp, and she’d ensure he’d never get rescued by the Federation to tell people what she had done. If she sold him to the Cardassians or Romulans or someone, the Federation could notice from the technological advances that _something_ was going on, send their own intelligence agents to investigate, and possibly rescue him, but if she sold him to the Ceuli or the Maierlens or Beryllians, he would be dead and the Federation would never learn of his fate.

Maybe he was wrong. Maybe Yalit was telling him the truth, that she was going to free T’Laren and offer the Federation a chance to ransom him back. But what if he wasn’t wrong? What if he let her send T’Laren off the ship to whatever unknown fate, and then he’d be alone and totally helpless for whatever Yalit wanted to do with him? What if Yalit decided to _keep_ him, threaten him with torture to keep him producing technological advancements for her to sell? Her brood were obviously good at keeping secrets, given that Ferengi women weren’t even allowed to manage money and yet she was in charge of their family’s fortune. If an obscure Ferengi physicist suddenly started coming up with major advancements in technology, how many years would it be before the Federation figured out where he’d gone? And what would have happened to T’Laren in the meantime? No one was looking out for her; until she’d turned up on _Yamato_ her family and friends had thought she was dead.

Either Yalit was stupid, and refused to recognize the damage that her criminal activities would do to her reputation if she were found out; or Yalit was canny and ruthless, understood well the danger and fully intended to prevent it from becoming a problem by never letting either Q or T’Laren anywhere near the Federation again, and was clever enough to lie about it to keep Q producing. And given everything she’d done, given the kidnapping in the first place and the fact that she’d seen through Q’s own lies and tortured him into submission, given that she’d sent T’Laren a peace offering impregnated with more drugs and a plausible lie to keep T’Laren taking the drug that was supposed to let Yalit’s sons rape her… no. No, Q was sure of it. Yalit intended to kill them both, sell them into terrible slavery, or do _something_ that would keep her crimes from ever being found out.

He started feigning exhaustion then, started yawning, pretending to nod off at his work and then jerk himself “awake” with a start, made his speech start to slur as the day wore on, blinked a lot, closed his eyes and pretended to have a hard time opening them, and generally acted distracted and sluggish. Finally Yalit laughed at him harshly. “Rough night for you, hmm? Can’t keep yourself awake? Go back to your woman and sleep, you’re useless to me like this. I want you alert and fresh tomorrow morning, or I’ll wake you up with a little of this.” She patted the neurowhip.

Q didn’t have to feign fear. “You won’t need to do that. I’ll be fine tomorrow. I just… I just need to get some sleep. We’ll finish building this tomorrow. I promise.”

“Good. You remember that.”

They had to escape. He had to concentrate on pretending to be tired, on walking slowly when he wanted to run, bite his nails or lips, run his hands through his hair, pace wildly. Even when he was back in his room, his cell, he couldn’t reveal how panicked he was. How could they get away when he couldn’t coordinate anything with T’Laren? He couldn’t even tell her of the threat; the trick with the sonic shower wouldn’t work twice.

T’Laren was in the main area of the room, sitting in a meditative pose on the couch. She had showered and gotten dressed, and while she still looked thin, overtired and a bit haggard, at least she didn’t look like, well, like she’d been locked in a closet for a day and a half. Q felt a sudden rush of concern and fear for her as he saw her; what if Yalit did send her away in two days? How could they engineer an escape in that amount of time? What was Yalit going to do to her in two days? Where were they sending her? Not the Bolian homeworld, he knew, but where?

And then he felt an answering response – guilt, still, and self-hatred, and nagging arousal, and a sense of failure, and worry. They had a mental link, still, and simply seeing her and feeling concern for her had automatically opened his shields and let it flow between them again.

In as brusque a voice as he could manage under the circumstances, he said, “My back is killing me. Can I trust you not to leap on me and rape me if you fix it? Because I really think you owe me at least that much.”

Her face lit up, for moderate, almost-Vulcan-controlled-but-not-there-yet values of lighting up. “You would… trust me to touch you again?”

“That depends on whether you feel an overwhelming need to invade my mind, take me over and make me do nauseating things to your body, or not. Think you can control yourself?”

“I – yes, yes, of course. Of course I’ll help you. I’ll do anything you ask.”

A completely unwanted thought about things he might ask her to do that would be fair recompense for the disgusting things she’d made him do for her flitted through his head, but he crushed it. This was serious, and the fact that the things she’d done to and for him yesterday, before everything had gone bad, had stimulated his imagination in ways he’d rather not have it stimulated under the circumstances had to be irrelevant. “Fine. I’ll take off my shirt. Don’t consider it an invitation; I just want a decent backrub.”

“You don’t need to. I… I don’t believe you’ve ever… I’ve done it with your clothing on every other time I can recall.”

“Yes, well, there hardly seems a point to maintaining any sense of bodily modesty around you anymore, is there? I used to make you do it with my clothes on because I didn’t want to be inadvertently sending you any messages you could misinterpret about wanting to indulge in disgusting mortal reproductive rituals. Now that we actually _have_, I feel I can accomplish the same purpose by simply telling you, bluntly, no. I don’t want you like that, so keep it to a backrub.”

“I… of course.”

He went in the other room and stripped off his elaborate outer clothing so he could actually _get_ to his shirt, and took it off. She was a touch telepath. She needed skin to skin contact. His heart was pounding, terror that this wouldn’t work and they couldn’t come up with a plan and in two days T’Laren would be sent off to slavery or death and he’d be left alone to face a similar fate by himself, mixed with desperate hope that maybe this _would_ work and they could find a way to win free, and the excitement at the thought of touching another mind. If they didn’t merge, if they kept it to the top levels – and after his experiences yesterday, Q was sure he could keep it there as long as T’Laren didn’t go berserk and use all her telepathic strength on him – then he could talk to her the way he had talked to other Q. He had been deaf and mute to his own native language for so long, afraid of what very little communication he _could_ manage in it because it would leave him so exposed, but now the worst had happened and he knew how to keep himself safe, assuming she didn’t assault him, which he _had_ to assume because she seemed sane again and if he didn’t trust her when she was sane, he had no one he could trust at all.

When T’Laren came in the room, following him, he felt a surge of lust from her as she saw him shirtless, and for a moment he almost panicked and called the thing off. But then it tamped down, Vulcan control finally good for something. He felt nervous and vulnerable as he laid down on the bed, stomach down and face turned to the side of the bed where he could still see her. “You ruined my back, and the horrible chairs in engineering haven’t helped any. See what you can do with my shoulders.”

“I’ll do whatever I can to help.” Her fingers touched him, warm and firm, and he flinched. But there was no sense of cold fire, no impression of her mind pressing against his or the force of her telepathy opening a path to his mind. He could feel her even more strongly than before – she was so pathetically eager to please him, to repay him for what he did for her and make up for what she did to him, so relieved and overjoyed that he was actually willing to let her do anything to make recompense, let alone that he still trusted her enough to let her touch him, that it completely swamped the desire she still felt. He knew, then, that he’d made the right decision. T’Laren wasn’t in control of her emotions the way a Vulcan should be, possibly not even the way a human in her situation should be, but she was fully in control of her actions again and her emotional state was dominated by the guilt she felt over what she’d done to him and her desperate need to make amends. She wouldn’t hurt him.

Besides, her fingers felt incredibly good as they dug into his tight muscles. He hadn’t been making up the part about his back hurting. Q sighed, starting to relax slightly for the first time since waking up today.

Tentatively he sent, _*T’Laren? Can you hear me?*_

Her hands broke contact. “Q?” she said, sounding startled.

“What?” he asked, putting an irritable tone in his voice.

“I thought… Didn't you say something to me?”

“What, are you hallucinating now?”

“No… I must have imagined it.” She put her hands back on his body.

_*You didn’t. I’m sending telepathically. Try to avoid tipping the Ferengi off that I’m doing it, please. Can you respond?*_

For several seconds he thought she wasn’t going to respond, that either she couldn’t or she hadn’t received. Then she sent, _*Q? How are you… Are you actually speaking to me? Mind to mind?*_

_*You are a telepath. This really shouldn’t be such a big shock.*_

_*But I haven’t mind-melded with you.*_

_*You didn’t notice? We have some sort of mental link. Didn’t you feel it?*_

_//Shock/startlement/joy almost painful/*No… no, I didn’t. And they don’t work like this. I was… I couldn’t have done this with Soram unless we were actively melded. We only sensed each other’s emotions, and since we sought to control our emotions, even that was rare.*_

_*Well, I have spent millions of years talking to people in exactly this way, so it shouldn’t come as a complete surprise that I can actually speak telepathically. I mean, I’m not a talking horse.*_

_*I didn’t know I could talk this way, Q. It’s not just that I can telepathically communicate with a human without being melded… I know you have much more skill with telepathy than other humans. It’s that I can do this at all.*/wonderment/_

_*Well, restrain your enthusiasm, because we have a serious problem.*_ He sent her a memory burst of his conversation with Yalit, his thought processes, and his horrified realization that Yalit was most likely lying through her teeth.

_*Q?*/confusion//_

_//Irritation/*What? Did you not understand what I’m telling you?*_

_*That’s exactly it. I don’t understand. I… what you just thought at me was… too dense, I think. I only understood bits and pieces.*_

Q sighed in exasperation, the sound turning into a gasp of pleasure as T’Laren found a particularly painful knot and rubbed it hard, working it loose. His back arched, sensations that were almost painful in their intensity shooting through his nerves. “Nngh. Right there, yes.” _*I suppose there’s a difference between talking to a Q and talking to a mortal after all. I’ll have to do this the long, slow way, I suppose.*_

_*Do you even realize how amazing it is that we can communicate at all this way? This just is not how Vulcan telepathy works.*_

_*Are you going to bitch about it all night? We have serious matters to discuss.*_

_*I’m not complaining. Far from it. I’m astonished. But yes, I did gather from what little I was able to interpret of what you sent that there’s a problem. Something about, you think Yalit is going to kill us?*_

_*She told me--*_ He actually had to focus to keep it verbal; his instinct was to just send T’Laren the memory of the conversation, but apparently either their communication channel didn’t have the bandwidth or T’Laren lacked the processing power to handle memory bursts outside of a full meld. _*When the power failed, she told me that if I gave her transwarp and worked with her to prevent these kinds of problems, she’d return you to the Federation. That she wouldn’t sell you to the Romulans, because she won’t make enough profit on it to go to the Neutral Zone. She was saying it so I would get the power back on without blowing up the ship, but I thought she was sincere, until today. But she said today that she would be dropping you on the Bolian homeworld in two days. There’s no way we could be near the Bolian homeworld enough that you could be dropped there in two days. And then I realized that if she lets us go back to the Federation, her reputation as a scientist will be destroyed… she’ll be a convicted felon, or an accused rapist, or even if she does manage to get a pardon she’ll still never live down what she did to us with drugging you. But if she kills you or sells you into slavery, after you’re off the ship, how would I know? It makes much more sense for her to kill us or dispose of us by selling us into slavery than it does to ever let us go back to the Federation.*_

_*…Yes. That makes sense, I’m afraid.*_

_*So what do we do about it?*_

_*I don’t know. You are hardly a trained fighter and they have never hesitated to stun me. Is there a way you can get the power to fail while you’re in engineering?*_

He grinned. _*Absolutely. And if I know it’s coming, I can get into the Jeffries tubes and get to a computer, so when the power comes on, I can get into the system.*_

_*How would you do that? They locked us out.*_

_*You remember that program I wrote for you to restrict my own access to the system? Remember that back door you pointed out that I could have written into it if I felt like it?*_

_//Amusement/*I did wonder if you might have done something like that.*_

_*Who, me, be devious? Naah.*_

_*As long as you can guarantee that the power will be off for a few minutes, I can easily locate and nerve pinch the guards that are usually outside our door.*_

Q hesitated. T’Laren was Starfleet, and a Vulcan to boot. She was probably not going to react well to this, but he had to point it out. _*You can’t nerve pinch them, T’Laren. We’re vastly outnumbered. We have to kill them.*_

_*If we have to kill, then we can kill. But if I creep up on an opponent in darkness, and I have a way to disable him and take his phaser without killing, that is the only right thing to do.*_

_*No. Morally right, maybe, but we don’t have the luxury of taking the moral high ground. Our lives are at stake, T’Laren. There’s at least twenty Ferengi aboard this ship at any given time, because that’s how many men Yalit told me she’d have take turns raping you if I didn’t help you with your little problem.*_ He caught a backwash of horror and rage from her mind. Good. Maybe if he reminded her of exactly what the Ferengi were capable of doing to them, she wouldn’t resist him on this. _*If you knock them unconscious, they’ll start waking up while you’re still taking others out. They’re not going to go easier on us if they recapture us just because we refrained from killing any; if we successfully pull off an escape attempt and then we don’t follow through by getting them all off the ship one way or another, they will outnumber us, they’ll overpower us, and then they probably __will__ rape you just to teach us a lesson or something. And they’ll probably use a neurowhip on me. Or rape me, too. Yalit threatened to have her goons do that once. Or both.*_ His fingers tightened in the blankets, clenching, unable to stop himself from tensing up even as T’Laren was still working on his back, and he knew the full dimension of the fear he felt was getting through the link, but he didn’t try to hide it from her. She had to know what they were up against, and she had to know how worried he was. _*And then they’ll kill you or sell you to slavers who’re on their way to Romulus anyway, and they’ll sell me to people who want to torture me to death. We __can’t__ fail. We don’t have a starship backing us up, and they’ve got a whole other ship they can bring into play; if I let the test run for a few minutes before the crystals blow, the other ship won’t be in range to help them for some time, but we have no idea how many Ferengi are aboard that thing and we __don’t have weapons__ worth speaking of. We have to be able to take them all out, rapidly, have them stay out, get the transwarp back on and run like hell, or alternately take them all out, have them stay out, and find a way to destroy their other ship even though its shields are probably better than our weapons. We can’t do that if we let them live.*_

He could actually feel her recognition that his logic was correct, even as her moral system rebelled against his conclusions. _*Very well. Until we have secured control of the ship, we will kill them if they are combatants. I don’t want to kill the child who brought me the grapes, and I don’t want to kill Yalit. //i do want to kill yalit but wanting to kill is wrong// People who cannot fight, we should not kill.*_

_*Children can point a phaser. So can Yalit. I won’t promise not to kill anyone until I know we’re safe.*_

_*Q, you aren’t the one who’s going to be killing people. I have the military training. You need to take control of the computer system and keep yourself in a safe, secure location until I’ve secured the ship.*_

_//negation/*You’re right, it would be ridiculous to have me running around with a phaser. But I’m not going to sit there like some sort of princess in a tower and wring my hands while you risk your life. I’m going to do what I know how to do.*_

_*And in the context of warfare, what do you know how to do?*_

_//vicious delight/*I know how to use technology in ways you mortals have never thought of, because I’ve seen other mortals come up with it. I gave the Federation the tricks they used to defeat the Borg. And I know something that nobody in the Federation or even its nastier neighbors seems to have figured out.*_

_*What is that?*_

_*That teleportation isn’t just a means of transport. It’s a weapon.*_

She stopped touching him abruptly, but he could still hear her mental voice. _*The __transporter?__*_

_*Bingo.*_

_*How am I still hearing you? I’m not touching you anymore!*_

_*I don’t know, but I am getting a horrendous headache. I think perhaps my brain isn’t really well-designed for this anymore.*_

_*Well. We have a plan, at least. And perhaps, if we can communicate when we aren’t touching, we can coordinate tomorrow. I’ll assume I should move the moment the power goes out, but if you have a way of warning me before it goes back on…*_

_*If I’m still in engineering to know it’s coming back when it goes back on, the plan will have gone very wrong. I won’t be able to warn you. But if we can communicate without touching… I have no idea if it will work at a distance. You’re not a distance telepath of any kind and I shouldn’t be a telepath at all. But we can try it tomorrow when I’m in engineering, see if it works. And I really have to stop doing this. Everything’s starting to get halos.*_

_*A migraine?*_

_*About to be.*//alarm//*What are you doing?*_

She dug her fingers into a spot on his collarbone. _*I’m about to knock you unconscious. If you lose consciousness before the migraine starts, it might never begin, or you might be unconscious through the worst of it.*_

_*Really? That actually works? Why didn’t you do that for me when I wanted you to break my neck?*_

_*I wasn’t entirely rational at the time, Q. I didn’t think of it.*_

He took a deep breath. The idea of being knocked out wasn’t appealing, but the terrible pain building in his head, and the eerie glow around solid objects heralding pain so terrible he wouldn’t be able to tolerate light or sound, were much less so. Q hadn’t had many full-blown migraines in his human existence – most of his headaches were tension headaches, terrible in their own way but not as mind-numbingly awful as a migraine. Most of them had happened while the Maierlen assassin was stalking around the base, so he’d thought they were a reaction to the waspoid stings, but since then he’d had one or two without any connection to the waspoids. Even Li had been willing to give him medication when he’d been hit by migraines – apparently, unlike his other headaches, they actually showed up when Li scanned his brain. _*All right. Go ahead.*_

There was a sudden stabbing pain in his collarbone, and then waves of numbness radiating down his spine, nauseating him and making him lose any sense of his body, and then a final wave of cold darkness washing over his consciousness.

* * *

T’Laren sat by Q’s unconscious form for several minutes after nerve-pinching him. She hoped he’d naturally fall asleep before the nerve pinch wore off; it wasn’t that late, but he hadn’t been sleeping well.

He was still willing to trust her. At least, to the extent of being willing to work with her to escape the Ferengi. Perhaps she shouldn’t read so much into it; Q was capable of being ruthlessly practical when he had to be, and with his life at stake it shouldn’t be surprising that he could push aside his anger at her. But the fact that he could do it at all gave her hope.

She’d had no idea that she’d formed a permanent link with him last night. Most Vulcans were bonded together by healers, either as children or in their marriage ceremony as adults, the way she had with Soram. She hadn’t even known she _could_ form a permanent link with anyone, much less a non-telepath. Although she was starting to have her suspicions about that.

What Q had just been doing wasn’t possible for a non-telepath. It wasn’t just that non-telepaths wouldn’t know how to conduct a conversation in _words_ while mind-to-mind; he had actually opened a link and transmitted through it, and kept doing it even when she wasn’t touching him at all. The fact that the link had already been formed, by her, while she’d been mad with _pon farr_ too long denied, was bizarre in itself, but the fact that Q could use it the way he had… the only conclusion she could draw was that he wasn’t a non-telepath. Somehow, he was a telepath without telepathy, locked inside his own head until someone linked to him, but as soon as the bridge was built he was apparently capable not just of sending messages over it but of sending troops. Her mind was still reeling from his attempt to transmit her a set of full memories; she could have gotten that from him if they had been melded, in full mental contact, but not over a marital link.

And that was another thing. Eventually she was going to have to either figure out how to dissolve the link, or explain to Q that by Vulcan common law they were now married. Though the upper classes of pre-Surak Vulcan had demanded elaborate ceremonies to establish marital bonds between betrothed couples, the commoners of Old Vulcan had had much simpler strategies; they went to the healer, they got bonded, they consummated the bond in _pon farr_, and that was it, they were married. Then after they recovered the man usually went to live with the woman’s family and the woman’s family threw a really big party for the couple. No one on Vulcan did things that way anymore; when Surak’s teachings had leveled most of Vulcan’s class system everyone had adopted the upper class marriage customs, where betrothal occurred in childhood and was formalized in the ceremony before _pon farr_, or possibly during it, but the common law was still on the books and quite a few of the spacefaring Vulcans T’Laren descended from through her mother used the simplified custom, usually but not always after getting a Federation marriage license. Generally, only spacefarers who married homeworld Vulcans, like T’Laren’s own mother, bothered with the full ceremony. Common law would not recognize a bond between two women, but between a man and a woman, or two men, a permanent bond forged in _pon farr_ meant the couple was married, even if they had made the bond themselves without relying on a healer.

There were more ridiculous things in the universe than the notion of accidentally marrying Q, or of herself _or_ Q marrying anyone, in fact, but right now she couldn’t think of them. She was legally dead and Q was, well, Q. And after what she had just done to him, she was sure he’d be even _more_ appalled than he would ordinarily be at the thought of marrying her.

Of course, if tomorrow didn’t go well the whole point would be moot. She was fairly sure that she could force the Ferengi to kill her in combat if she had to – she would _not_ be made a captive breeder. But they would be much more careful with Q, as he was both more valuable and less dangerous in combat. Although, that would possibly be an underestimation. Q couldn’t fight hand to hand, she wasn’t sure he’d even know _how_ to use a phaser or be able to aim it, and he would be helpless against weapons like the neurowhip… but given what he had thought to her about using the transporter for a weapon… It was entirely possible that Q and she, in combat, would be most akin to the Vulcan weapons of mass destruction, the high-powered psis of the days before Surak, and the ordinary troops who would always accompany the psis to protect them from mundane threats long enough to allow them to deploy their minds and kill mass numbers. Q wasn’t a psi, but his intellect might possibly make him far, far more dangerous than she was… if he could actually deploy his plan, and that would depend on what she could do to help him.

She had very little interest in food, but she needed to eat something. Tomorrow she would need to be at her full strength. T’Laren went over to the bowl of oatmeal from this morning and forced herself to finish it.

* * *

In the morning, it took a great deal of effort for Q to hide how nervous he was. He dressed in one of the exercise outfits T’Laren had made him get out of the replicator and choked down breakfast, the whole time thinking about how he could modify the notes he’d already created to make sure the crystals blew. It would be best if he could let the transwarp test run for several minutes, so they would be as far from _Profit Margin_ as possible. He’d need time to take out all the Ferengi here on _Ketaya_ before having to deal with the other ship.

As he left the room, he tried sending to T’Laren. _*Can you hear me?*_

Several moments passed, and then, _*Yes. Where are you?*_

_*Not in engineering yet. I’ll try again when I get there.*_

He smiled cheerily at Yalit as he walked in to engineering. “I think we’re almost ready for another test, if you folks implemented the changes I showed you yesterday. I have a couple more things you need to do, and then we should be good to go.”

“You’re remarkably cheerful.”

“I’m looking forward to getting this thing done so you actually get around to ransoming me back to the Federation. I’m sure that as long as transwarp is incomplete, you won’t even open the bidding.”

“You’re awfully confident that the bidding will go your way.”

“None of the tiny little pipsqueak species who want to kill me have the resources the Federation does, the Cardassians have no money, the Klingons already have a treaty with the Federation so they’d just return me, so really my only threat is the Romulans and you’ve already admitted you don’t want to go anywhere near the Neutral Zone. I imagine you’ll have to involve the others in the bidding just to ratchet the price up, but I have every confidence that the Federation can and will outbid _any_ other power in the galaxy.” And this was true, at least as far as powers that the Q Continuum wouldn’t step in to protect him from per their agreement with Picard and the Federation, but irrelevant now that he was sure she didn’t dare to return him to the Federation.

“I might change my mind about the Romulans.”

“Yes, and the Romulans might take me off your hands and then blow you up to recover their money. There’s a reason they’re famous for deceit.”

“Well. We’ll see. What have you got for us today?”

He took out the notes. This part was really, really important. He hadn’t been able to refer to the notes, since they were kept in engineering, so he’d had to do the calculations in his head, from memory. In his head wasn’t a difficulty, but from memory could possibly be a problem. As it turned out, though, as he reviewed the notes again, they matched what he had remembered. His calculations would work.

“All right, here’s what you need to do…”

As he copied out the second half of the notes, decrypting it as he went along, he introduced several errors. If Yalit caught him at this… he didn’t even want to think about that. But he maintained his composure. Yalit had absolutely no way of reading Vizoran mathematical script, had no way of knowing what angle he’d rotated his diagrams to. She’d catch him when the power went out, but she couldn’t catch him before that. He had to believe that. Because if he didn’t believe that, he’d never be able to hide his fear, and _that_ would give him away.

It was noon by the time they had implemented his designs. Four cups of coffee and he was a jittery wreck. Over and over again he measured the distance to the Jeffries tube entrance with his eyes, always when Yalit wasn’t looking. Over and over he scanned the engineering room, observing where everyone was, mapping his escape route. When the test began, he propped himself against a wall near the Jeffries tubes, arms folded, a confident grin on his face to mask the near-panic he felt. How was he going to do this? He wasn’t a security officer, he wasn’t trained for physical violence. What made him think he could do this?

Lack of choice, he reminded himself. If he failed, he’d die or be sold into slavery, or both. But if he didn’t try, the same would happen. His only hope was to try. He couldn’t make matters _worse_ for himself at this point.

But what if he was wrong? What if Yalit was planning to ransom him back to the Federation?

Then she’d still have the secret of transwarp, and the Q Continuum would condemn him for that the moment it got any further than her, and he would never go home again. This was the only way he could make up for his weakness in giving in to her, the only way he could erase his mistake. Yalit and every engineer in this room had to die, to protect the mortals in this quadrant from the destabilizing influence of suddenly acquiring working Thetaran transwarp technology. If he didn’t succeed in taking over the ship and destroying the Ferengi, he might as well die, because if Yalit sold that transwarp drive his existence had no meaning.

They passed the ten minute mark. “Looks good,” Yalit said. “We’re doing better than the last test.”

“Mother, do you think we’ll do it this time?” one of the Ferengi asked.

“We’ll run the test for thirty minutes, then turn around and return to _Profit Margin_. An hour long test should prove whether the system is stable or not.”

_*T’Laren. Do you hear me?*_

Again the momentary lag, and then _*Yes, I hear you.*_

His head was starting to hurt. _*Be ready.*_

Q got himself another cup of coffee and returned to his spot against the wall, except this time half a meter closer to the Jeffries tube. The Ferengi were all gathered around the consoles excitedly, chattering about the potential profits they could make if this worked.

Deep breath. Another. Any minute now.

Why hadn’t they blown yet? Did he make a mistake in his calculations? Was this going to actually _work_, and ruin his only chance of freedom?

And then there was a huge noise, the crash of crystals shattering and the sound of an explosion, and all the power went dead.

Showtime.

In the dark, Q took three steps along the wall and felt for the hatch in the wall. He’d removed it so many times while he was exploring _Ketaya_ and working on ways to fix the problem Lhoviri had left him with, he had no trouble doing it in total darkness. Yalit was shouting about getting a lantern on. That wasn’t good. He had to move quickly.

Q clambered into the Jeffries tube and pulled himself through. Artificial gravity was still on; it would only go out if _all_ the crystals blew. It was kind of unfortunate about that because it would give him a huge advantage if gravity did go out, given that he was the only being here who actually thought about space in three dimensions (more, technically, but at _least_ three), but on the other hand, if all the crystals blew, he didn’t have enough replacements to get warp back once the Ferengi were defeated.

Three meters in. Turn left. If they came after him he was trapped; they were smaller than he was, and his size gave him very little maneuvering room in these tubes. He had to get to one of the consoles before the power came on. They’d get it on quickly with all the spare crystals he’d shown them the last time; what he’d engineered should only have blown one or two. Half a meter and then up. Four more meters and he was there, feeling the console under his fingertips.

He waited, until the dim lights of the Jeffries tubes came on. Q waited impatiently as the console booted up. Before the LCARS screen came up, he hit the escape sequence, which dumped him into the text input screens the programmers used to deal with system level administrative tasks. And then he put in his back door command and sent it.

“Good luck trying to get anything to work now, trolls,” he muttered to himself. The LCARS screen came back up, with the request for password. Q typed the password, and then spoke it, restoring his voiceprint to the computer.

The feeling of being able to control the computer again with his voice was an unbelievable relief. But it would be stupid to continue to speak; Ferengi hearing was excellent, and he had no defenses if they climbed in here and found him. Without computer access they’d have a hard time locating him, but he’d lose that advantage if he kept talking. So he opened another keyboard interface, and began to type.

The first thing he did was pull up their location. They were actually more than halfway to the Romulan Neutral Zone. And nowhere near the Bolian homeworld. Q wondered if Yalit had made a deal with the Romulans after all. A neutral trading post, Miona Station, was within a few hours of transit from here at regular warp, slightly over a day from their original position before transwarp kicked on. That was probably where Yalit had planned to dump T’Laren, and possibly where she’d meet and negotiate with whoever she wanted to invite to bid on Q. Q swallowed, realizing suddenly that the Ceulan homeworld was actually only two or three days of transit from here. Pain was pain and death was death, but the way the Ceuli wanted to execute him frightened him more than most of his other enemies’ intentions toward him.

He checked for _Profit Margin_. It wasn’t in sensor range. The only ships that were appeared to be heading toward or leaving Miona Station. So it was at _least_ a few hours away, possibly as much as more than half a day. The crystals had blown out near the edge of Yalit’s planned course, before they could turn around and head in the other direction – luck, because he hadn’t known what sort of course Yalit would plot for the transwarp test.

First things first. Q pulled up a map of all life signs on _Ketaya._ One Vulcan, in the corridor outside his suite. Good, T'Laren had gotten out. One human, in the Jeffries tube system. And twenty-one Ferengi -- no, make that twenty. He'd thought for a moment there was a life sign in the corridor with T'Laren, but he must have been wrong, because there was no sign of a Ferengi there now. There were six on the bridge, two in the captain’s quarters, seven in engineering, and five more moving in the corridors.

The bridge was important. There were only two places on the ship that allowed precise control of the transporter, the transporter room itself and the bridge. And the bridge would give him control of many other systems, unlike the transporter room. Strategically, he needed control of the bridge.

Q began typing in commands. He had a plan.

* * *

When Q warned her to be ready, T’Laren paced over to the door. She couldn’t do anything to tip her hand to the Ferengi monitoring her, so she paced, restlessly, like a caged tiger. And then the power went out.

She’d done this before. Without wasting energy, she pulled the panel off the emergency door release and yanked the lever. The doors opened loudly, as she’d expected. She ducked to the side of the door.

“You better not be trying to escape again! I’ll shoot!” a voice yelled. “Don’t think I won’t!”

It was one of the ones who had taken her swimming, who had been stroking his lobes and probably fantasizing about raping her. Sudden rage built. T’Laren had much more control of herself now that the worst symptoms of the _pon farr_ had passed, but because she hadn’t been able to fully satisfy it, elements of the emotional instability and violence remained.

She waited, silent, barely breathing. “Hey! Where are you? I’m going to start shooting if I don’t hear from you!”

And there he was. She could hear his feet, the jingle of the little metal bangles he wore to prove how rich he was, could smell worms on his breath. In one swift motion, T’Laren turned to face him, grabbed him, and clamped the back of his neck in the _tal shaya_ maneuver. A quick clench of her fingers, a twist, and his neck broke neatly and cleanly.

She was breathing hard. The worst part of this was not that she had to kill. Q was right, unfortunately; as outnumbered as they were, they really didn’t have a choice about that. The worst part was that she liked it. Killing the Ferengi sent a thrill through her body almost as exciting as finally having Q in her arms had been. T’Laren knew, intellectually, that the whole reason for Surakian discipline was that Vulcans were biologically an incredibly violent species, that the _pon farr_ had _always_ linked lust and violence, and that if she was a chooser, killing men who stood between her and the man she had chosen was part of the blood fever and could arouse her as much as killing a challenger for his woman could arouse a man… and in fact the bloodlust had even been known to short-circuit the _pon farr_, satisfying its requirements without sex being involved at all. It was biology, not her fault. But she felt filthy, more degraded than she’d felt naked and locked in a closet howling her needs to the uncaring walls. Not only was she a rapist, she got a sexual thrill out of killing people. Telling herself that she wasn’t really like this and it was the remnants of the _pon farr_ doing it to her didn’t actually make her feel much better about it.

Well. If killing people with her bare hands sent shocks of pleasure through her nervous system, perhaps killing people with a phaser would let her achieve more detachment, more control. She groped in the dark until she found the dead man’s phaser. It was already set to kill, not stun. Apparently the Ferengi had been really frightened of her ability to withstand stun while the _pon farr_ was in full rage. The stun setting would take her out _now_, but they probably didn’t know that. She would have to be very careful.

When T’Laren had gotten dressed this morning, she had never put her boots on; she hadn’t bothered to try to wear footgear since removing them during the _pon farr_, in fact, because her body was in water conservation mode and her feet were somewhat bloated. Now, it would be helpful – boots would be loud on the corridor floor. Silently she padded out of the room barefoot, listening and looking. The darkness was total, but her eyes had adapted and would see any heat source as powerful as a warm-blooded being as a dim glow. The Ferengi could hear better than she could, but they would be walking about with clacking boots and jingling metal, and she could see and smell better than they’d be able to. Her hand held the phaser, lightly. She’d sense Q’s approach telepathically, and probably smell him as well, before she’d be in range to shoot him, so she was confident that she couldn’t accidentally run into him, and _anyone_ else she encountered on this ship was an enemy to shoot on sight. There would be nothing stopping her from firing the phaser the moment she saw or otherwise sensed any being at all.

* * *

It wasn't difficult for Q to find the commands to lock the bridge so only his voiceprint could open it. That would keep anyone from being able to get on or off the bridge. Hacking into life support was a bit more difficult. For obvious reasons it wasn’t a system that had been made particularly easy to get to. But after a few minutes he had control. Now to set things for _his_ benefit.

_*T’Laren. Can you handle zero gee?*_

_*Most certainly.*_

Good. He killed gravity. The resulting weightlessness gave him a sense of euphoria, literally a weight that dragged him down being lifted off him. That ought to make life extremely difficult for the Ferengi.

The next thing to do was make things easier for T’Laren and more difficult for the Ferengi she’d be fighting. He set the temperature, humidity and oxygen mix controls to Vulcan normal – hot, dry and thin. Given that the Ferengi homeworld was more humid and cooler than Earth was in general, with a denser atmosphere, changing to Vulcan normal would be much harder on them than it was on him. Although, at some point, he would have to get himself an oxygen tank. His brain wouldn’t work at its highest capacity if he didn’t provide it as much oxygen as humans were evolved to need. But it would be some time before he got to that point.

And now, the main event.

The prospect of doing this both frightened and exhilarated him. Ever since becoming mortal, Q had never taken another mortal’s life. He considered it wrong, for the same reason harming another Q would have been wrong. Harming or destroying a life that existed at your own level of existence was a moral evil, whereas harming or destroying a lesser life was just not particularly nice. But when one was of the Powers of the universe, one could pretty much count on other Powers not doing anything to harm one. Once everyone reached a certain level of evolutionary development, violence between beings was almost unheard of. It wasn’t quite as easy to maintain non-violence when one was mortal, because there were no shortage of other mortals trying to hurt you.

He reminded himself that he didn’t have the luxury of a moral high ground. T’Laren’s and his lives or freedom were at stake. Even Federation law authorized him to use deadly force to protect himself from death or slavery. The Ferengi were pirates, and you were allowed to kill pirates.

Q took over transporter control. From here there was a limited number of things he could do, but they were enough. The primary safety interlock on the transporter would not allow life forms to be transported anywhere but an enclosed space with atmosphere or a planetary surface. But the primary safety interlock on the transporter, like the primary safety interlock on the airlock and the replicator restriction table attached to his voiceprint, was based on a piece of hardware that Q had removed during his time with T’Laren before the conference. And the secondary safeties were software-controlled, and therefore, with the level of access his backdoor gave him, Q could just shut them off.

He checked the life forms on the bridge. They were clustered around the door. Excellent, that would make grabbing multiple life forms easy. Q put in transport source coordinates, target coordinates, and activated.

Three of the life signs vanished off his map. They reappeared outside the ship, and less than a minute later disappeared again. His life sign scan wasn’t looking for dead bodies that _used_ to be alive.

The other three life signs on the bridge had spread out. No, be honest. They weren’t life signs, they were Ferengi. They were living, sentient beings of the same evolutionary level that he now lived at, very similar to himself as he was now, who were probably soiling their pants in terror right now, quite possibly begging and crying for mercy. Watching mortals beg and cry had occasionally amused him in the old days; after the Continuum had executed two of his two friends who had committed unauthorized reproduction _and_ gone to live among humans, Q, forbidden to take out his frustrations on the human species, had run into a hapless Physm ship, and had taken great sadistic pleasure in their pleas for mercy when they turned out to be far too mentally disorganized, too superstitious and not nearly logical or rigorous enough, to pass his test. That was what they should get, he’d thought, for being too stupid to deserve space travel. He hadn’t penalized the entire species, because _one_ had been smart enough to figure out how to survive, so he’d let her live and limp back to her homeworld… which, of course, had backfired on him a year ago when she’d come for him, because she’d still been too stupid to figure out that sending an assassin to kill him could very well end up killing an innocent person by mistake, but obviously the possibility that she could someday threaten him had never occurred to him at the time.

Now Q took no real pleasure in these deaths. When he’d been thinking of them as little dots on his map, obstacles to be overcome, he had enjoyed wiping them out the way he’d have enjoyed taking an opponent’s rook or bishop during a game of chess. When he reminded himself that they were the same kind of life form as he was now, capable of the same emotions he felt, it made him slightly sick. He wished he could reclaim the detachment, the feeling that mortal lives were nothing and he could destroy them for fun if he wanted to, that he’d felt as a Q, but that was long gone… he’d spent too long living alongside them, suffering the things they suffered, to be able to enjoy mortal deaths. This was something he had to do because they were going to kill him and T’Laren if he didn’t, but the only Ferengi he was going to enjoy killing was Yalit. The others were merely their mother’s (or grandmother’s, in the case of the younger ones) dupes. He had to kill them, but he couldn’t make himself feel good about it.

One was sitting in the captain’s chair. That was probably DaiMon Dar, who had viciously insulted T’Laren for nothing but being a woman and then had fondled her at phaserpoint and threatened to rape her to make Q cooperate. Well, okay, maybe Q could feel just a mild bit of sadistic pleasure in _one_ of the deaths besides Yalit’s. He put in the coordinates for the captain’s chair, made the transporter narrow-focus onto the life form only so he wouldn’t accidentally take the chair, and beamed whichever Ferengi it was into space, hoping it was the DaiMon. For all Q knew, given that Dar had been the first one to bring up _farr t’gahn_, he might have actually been the one who had T’Laren drugged, and Yalit might simply have given her blessing rather than coming up with the plan.

And then he heard voices. “The tricorder says he’s right up ahead!”

Silently Q swore. This was bad. He couldn’t beam any life forms out of the Jeffries tubes with the level of control he had here; in fact the life sign monitors hadn’t been able to precisely tell him that anyone was in the Jeffries tubes besides himself. The Ferengi were still reading as being in engineering… no, there it went. There was a lag, that was the problem. That, and he really wasn’t deep enough in to make finding him a challenge.

He couldn’t retreat; without this control console he had no weapons at all. If they had tricorders, they could find him wherever he went. Quickly Q paged through the help file looking for the hull breach protocols. Was there a way to throw a barrier between him and his pursuers?

Yes, but not a very good one. Q put up a containment force field less than half a meter away from him, designed for a serious hull breach that would penetrate halfway to engineering. It would work very well against hard vacuum, but it wouldn’t stand up to phaser fire for long.

_*T’Laren!*/sheer panic//_

_*What’s wrong?*_

_*There are Ferengi in the Jeffries tubes less than four meters from me. They say they have tricorders, so they’re going to find me any minu -- oh shit.*_ They came into view and immediately started firing at his force field. “There he is!” “Why can’t we hit him?” “It’s a forcefield! Change to kill setting and fire to overload the field!”

_*On my way.*_

_*Hurry!*_

He couldn’t simply sit here and let them shoot at him. When the field overloaded, any stray shot fired after that would hit him directly and kill him. Q floated backward, pushing himself with his hands on the tube flooring and walls while his legs were strung out behind him, watching them as they fired over and over again at his force field, and it flared brighter each time they did. If he remembered correctly, the next turn was… yes, right there. He rotated himself, pulled himself into the up tube, and flung himself downward, flying in the lack of gravity as fast as he could push himself against walls.

Above him he heard the sizzle as his force field failed, and now they were floating in after him, yelling. “Surrender now and we won’t kill you!”

Q resisted the temptation to yell back at them how completely untempting the offer was. Frankly he would prefer a quick burst of phaser fire to the slow evisceration the Ceuli would commit on him, or being enslaved for the rest of his life, not to mention that Yalit would certainly torture him with the neurowhip if she could get her hands on him alive. Particularly after she found out he’d just killed four of her family members. But while death by phaser was a better alternative than being taken alive, it still wasn’t a _good_ alternative. He was breathing hard, his heart pounding, and the dry heat and lower oxygen content of the air was making him dizzy as he fled. He had to put as many turns between him and the Ferengi as possible; as soon as they could see him they could shoot him. Q pushed off from the wall to his side and went rocketing down another tube, this one running alongside the inner Deck 3 bulkhead.

He sent T’Laren an image of his position in relation to a map of the ship itself, and felt her assent. She was in position to help him.

Q stopped at one of the junction points in the tube, breathing hard. The Ferengi came into view, and he threw up his hands. “Don’t shoot! I surrender!”

There were two of them. One of them adjusted his phaser, possibly setting it to stun. The other slapped his hand. “No, Fril. I don’t want him _unconscious_ for this.”

Q didn’t have to pretend to be afraid. He shrank back against the wall. “I surrender. Please don’t hurt me.”

This one was one of the guards Q had had several encounters with by now. He was one of the ones who’d held Q down and made him eat bugs. The Ferengi smiled with sharp-toothed malice and floated toward Q. “I said I wasn’t going to _kill_ you if you surrendered. I never said I wasn’t going to _hurt_ you, hyuu-mon.”

And then the deck panel between Q and the Ferengi banged open, directly in front of the one making threats. Before he could react a slim hand reached in and grabbed him by the lapel of his coat, and yanked him through the opening. Q heard a cracking noise, like stepping on a twig in a forest. The other Ferengi yelled, “Brill!” and pushed off toward the panel, phaser out.

Q sent T’Laren a spatial image of where the second Ferengi was in relation to the opening. Her other hand stuck through the opening and fired at the Ferengi. The blast sent the man backwards, floating back down the Jeffries tube with a black burn mark covering his entire torso and a look of agony frozen on his face, his eyes still open.

T’Laren stuck her head into the opening. “Q? Are you all right?”

He was possessed of a sudden urge to kiss her. Which, as grateful as he might be to her for saving his life, would be stupid, since it would imply that he was ready to forgive her for what had happened two days ago, which he wasn’t, or that he was open to the concept of indulging in more sordid activities with her, which… he wasn’t going to admit to if it was true. Instead he took a deep breath. He was shaking. “I’ll be fine, but I need to get an oxygen tank out of the nearest replicator. And painkillers. My head’s really starting to hurt.”

“Why did you change the environment to Vulcan normal atmosphere?”

“Because you can handle it and the Ferengi can’t.”

“What about you?”

“I can handle it better than the Ferengi. Especially since I still have replicator access, and they don’t, so I can get an oxygen tank.”

“The nearest replicator is in one of the passenger quarters. Do I have replicator access? I’ll get them for you.”

“No, I didn’t have your voiceprint on file. They erased our voiceprints, they didn’t just lock them out. I’d need to get back to the control console, but I have to do that anyway.” He looked past T’Laren. “Unfortunately there’s a dead Ferengi in my way. What happened to the other one?”

“The Vulcan death grip,” T’Laren said shortly. She didn’t sound happy about it.

“Can you give me his phaser?”

“Can you actually fire one?”

“I don’t see why not. They’re not that complicated.”

She bent down and retrieved the phaser while Q, with great distaste, fished the dead Ferengi out of the Jeffries tube and tossed him out the opening. “You can take his phaser if you want to be a two-fisted gunslinger.”

“I’m handed. It would do me little good.”

“Take it anyway. You can use it as a hand grenade if you overload it. It doesn’t look like it has the modern safeties on it.”

“Very well. How quickly do you need that oxygen?”

“I’ll re-enable you to the computer and then you go get it for me. Give me a minute, I have to get back to the console.”

“I’ll wait in the nearest passenger suite.”

Q pushed off back down the tubes, and quickly returned to the console. He set the computer system to accept the voiceprint of anyone speaking the password “shoeshine” – the first word that came up in the dictionary lookup – and then transmitted to T’Laren. _*Say “shoeshine” and you’ll be in.*_

_*Thank you,*_ she sent after a moment. _*That worked. Where do you want your oxygen?*_

_*I’ll have to get to the bridge in a few minutes, so just leave it in the tube there and close up the panel.*_

He checked the life sign map. _Uh-oh. This could be a problem._ Two of the Ferengi were heading for the transporter room, presumably to shut down the transporter physically. _*T’Laren! You need to get over to the transporter room! The Ferengi may be trying to shut it down!*_

_*Why? What are you using the transporter for?*_

_*Um… I transported four Ferengi into space.*_

_//Horror/disgust/…moderated by guilt/*I suppose killing by phaser or by breaking necks leaves them no less dead…*_

_*Yes, and you’d do well to remember that.*_

_*I committed suicide by spacing myself. It’s not a pleasant death, Q.*_

_*Well, once I have the bridge, I can beam them out on wide dispersal so they just never rematerialize. That would be painless. Besides, do you honestly think being shot with a phaser is fun?*_

_*No, but it kills very quickly. Being spaced… doesn’t.*_

_*That’s not what you told me when you threatened to throw me out the airlock… oh my head… I think the telepathy is causing this. I’m shutting up now.*_

His head was pounding horribly, and there were halos again. _Oh no. I can’t have a migraine. Not now._ He needed to get those meds. But first he needed to clear the bridge. No. Meds first. Reluctantly, Q went back to the spot in the tubes where T’Laren had left his medication and his oxygen tank. He grabbed the hypo and pressed it to his own neck, used to it from the days when Li had actually let him get the painkillers he needed out of the replicator. Oh, yes. That was _much_ better. The halos and the pounding faded away, and the wash of relief bathing his head felt almost like ecstasy in itself. A few hits off the oxygen tank eased the tightness in his chest, and he carried the tank back with him to the control console, since the passages were too narrow for him to wear it on his back.

Ferengi were clustered around the transporter. He needed to move quickly. He could take out the ones actually _at_ the transporter, but there was sustained phaser fire going on inside the bridge. They were probably trying to cut their way out, and if they succeeded and cut a hole in the bulkhead or cut the door open, the bridge wouldn’t be defensible anymore. No, he had to deal with the guys on the bridge, and trust T’Laren to protect the transporter. Besides, if he could take over the bridge and then lost transporter, there were other tricks he could pull. But he had no way of taking over the bridge – well, short of shooting the two Ferengi, and given that he had no experience with gun battles and they did, that didn’t sound like a great plan – without the transporter.

He zeroed in on the life sign nearest the door, the one near where the phaser was being used, and transported him into space, phaser and all. “Sorry,” Q muttered. “Once I get bridge control I can just disintegrate you guys, but until then I’m afraid it’s space for you.” Since T’Laren had pointed out to him that death by space was a very unpleasant way to go, he felt worse about killing them; in the past when he’d felt the need to kill mortals himself, he’d usually simply made them disappear, unless he was trying to make a point by killing them in a less merciful way. The majority of those mortals who’d ended up dead because of things he’d done had died as a side effect of something he’d put into motion, the way the Borg had killed 18 of Picard’s crew, not because he had personally killed them. It was already not sitting well with him that he had to kill mortals while he himself was also mortal; killing them in an extremely painful way was actually making him feel guilty about it, not a sensation he enjoyed. But he’d already been through all this already. He had no choice.

The last one was moving around the bridge rapidly. For a moment Q wondered what the hell he was doing, and then he realized. Of course, if he was moving rapidly and randomly, Q couldn’t lock on to him. The Ferengi had figured out the only way to save his own life. He was probably bouncing off the walls, flying around the bridge as fast as he could kick off the surfaces. Had Q still been a Q, conducting a test, he would spare the man’s life for being smart enough to solve the puzzle, but he was a human and powerless except for the control of the transporter. He couldn’t afford to let the Ferengi live.

And then he lost transporter control.

His readouts told him the transporter was disabled. T’Laren wasn’t there yet, but she was close. Q took a deep breath. Most likely this would get him killed. But at this point, it was one Ferengi who was frantically zipping around the bridge, who couldn’t possibly know if Q had left the control console or not, and Q could possibly outshoot one man who was taken completely off guard. He needed bridge control and from here he had no weapons that could work at a distance if he had no transporter. He could wait for T’Laren, but there was no guarantee she could get control of the transporter room; she was a Starfleet officer, not a superhero. She wasn’t even security; she was a counselor.

So. He took another deep breath, and then kicked off the wall. Time to try for the bridge. The worst that could happen was that he’d be killed; he was pretty sure they were beyond trying to take him alive by now.

* * *

T’Laren had training in zero gee, and training in combat, but not a lot of training in zero gee combat. A few minutes of logical reasoning, however, indicated that she should probably stick close to the ceiling, because the Ferengi were likely to be trying to stay on the floor and were unlikely to look up. Most planet-bound species didn’t. As a tiny girl, T’Laren remembered playing zero gee maneuvers with her mother; the spacefaring Vulcans trained their children to think in three dimensions, since they had invented faster than light travel several generations before artificial gravity, and their traditions, like most Vulcan traditions, had continued after there was no real need. But T’Lal had died, and T’Laren had spent the rest of her life on planets or in artificial gravity. She was no expert on this… but she was probably better at it than the Ferengi.

Fortunately, the _Tamlin_-class yachts had zero gee velcro strips running along the edges of the ceilings and floors. T’Laren acquired herself velcro gloves and knee pads, and began crawling along the ceiling edge like some sort of insect. Magnetics would have worked but would have been much louder than velcro.

It was much slower than she would have liked; kicking off the walls and flying down the corridor had much more appeal, but if one of the Ferengi surprised her she would have no way to change her trajectory and dodge if she were floating. She had more than enough physical strength to tear free of the velcro instantly if one surprised her now, and since she was on the ceiling, they were unlikely to surprise her.

By the time she reached the transporter, her heart sank. The doors to the transporter room were open, a position they should not be in unless they had jammed or someone had cut through them, and the two Ferengi inside the room had gotten the console panel off and were disassembling the transporter. No, to be more accurate, they were tearing it apart, ripping out wires in big handfuls. This wouldn’t be easy to repair; Q wouldn’t be happy. Maybe she shouldn’t have taken the time to use the velcro. Especially since it seemed she didn’t need it; the two men were held to the console with magnets on their belts, and were entirely occupied with what they were doing, not looking up or even noticing as she crawled into the room.

This was too easy. T’Laren drew her weapon and fired, twice. The first Ferengi dropped from a phaser to the head without ever seeming to realize the peril he was in; the second was looking up, an expression of shock on his face, when she shot him too. The surge of rage and satisfied bloodlust she had felt when she’d killed with her hands was almost, but not entirely, abated by killing from a distance; she felt a grim satisfaction that disturbed her, but was at least not bloodthirsty joy.

Now she was going to have to fix the transporter. She kicked off the ceiling, grabbed onto the console, and swung herself down where she could unbuckle the dead men’s belts and fasten one around herself. This left her uncomfortably exposed – she was visible to anyone who walked by the transporter room, with her back to the broken door, unable to see a potential threat – but there was no other way she was going to fix this thing.

She closed her eyes and summoned up images of the schematics of a transporter. Having a husband who’d been Chief Engineer was good for something; if they’d been more careful about _how_ they broke the transporter, she might be completely out of luck, but they had been randomly ripping out wires and all she needed to do was remember how to reconnect them. Most Vulcans had eidetic memory for anything they’d read. She certainly had read many of Soram’s technical manuals. What a pity she wasn’t one of the ones with eidetic memory.

Well. If this didn’t work she could contact Q and show him what she was seeing; if he didn’t know how to repair a transporter, he had access to a computer and could look up a manual. But she didn’t like the headache he had been suffering from. Q’s repeated migraines during distance telepathic contact told T’Laren that there was something harmful about this form of communication; perhaps there was a reason Vulcan telepathy didn’t usually work this way. She wished she had a medical tricorder to scan Q with, but there would be time for that after they won, if they lived, and if they didn’t win or didn’t live, the point would be moot.

* * *

There were three entrances to the bridge of _Ketaya_. One was the observation deck and dining room, one was the captain’s quarters, and one was the Jeffries tube access in the ceiling. Q had locked all of them earlier. Before he left the console, however, he unlocked the Jeffries tube access. This would be a problem if the Ferengi who was bouncing around the bridge figured out that the tube was unlocked and climbed into it, but it was unlikely he’d sit still long enough to try to test it after seeing five of his family members beamed away.

Q made sure the phaser was set to “kill” – quite aside from the fact that if he stunned his opponent he might not be able to bring himself to shoot to kill after that, a glancing blow from stun wouldn’t necessarily disable but a glancing blow from kill would cause considerable damage to his opponent – and then kicked off the walls and went up through the maze of access tubes, up to Deck 1, over the top of the deck with the hull of the ship right above him, and then down through the opening into the bridge. He shoved the panel open, quickly, and ducked back into the opening as phaser fire blistered the panel. Okay. Getting out of here was going to be a challenge.

“What did you do to my family?” the Ferengi in the room screamed. “Where did you beam them? Where did they go?”

The inside of the panel had a latching mechanism in the center, but the bottom was smooth, burnished ship-metal. Very slightly reflective. And the Ferengi wore very, very colorful clothes. Q could see him as the faintest of colored blurs reflected in the bottom part of the panel that was hanging down into the bridge.

“Space, actually,” he said. He needed to provoke the man, make him react stupidly. “But don’t worry, I was watching the life sign monitors. It took less than a minute for each of them to die.”

The Ferengi screamed, firing repeatedly in front of himself and flying across the room at the panel. Had Q let any part of his body through the opening, the Ferengi’s rapid phaser fire would have hit him. But Q could see the Ferengi’s approach, as the blur in the bottom of the panel got larger.

The colored blobs and the pattern of phaser fire indicated that the Ferengi had rotated himself so he was facing up, his arm coming around to point up. He was going to pass under the opening, just below the panel, and fire upward to take Q out. Q looked at the panel, at the image in it, at the tube around him, and calculated his angles. And then he fired through the opening, before the Ferengi’s eyes or gun had cleared the lip yet, pressing the trigger when none of the Ferengi was visible yet so that the actual firing, and the lightspeed death it emitted, would happen just at the moment that the top of the Ferengi’s head came into the phaser’s line of sight.

There was a horrific scream. Q kept his finger on the button for continuous fire for a second. No more flashing lights of phaser burst showed coming from the blob in the panel. And then the whole Ferengi’s head came into sight, or what was left of it as it had floated under Q’s phaser fire for a second. Q couldn’t even recognize which Ferengi this one had been.

His stomach heaved. _This is zero gee. I can’t throw up. Zero gee, can’t throw up. It’ll float all over the room and there’ll be no way to clean it and it will be disgusting. Can’t throw up, zero gee._

It didn’t help. He threw up.

He did manage to throw up in the Jeffries tube, retching repeatedly until there was nothing coming up but bile, and then he pushed himself through the opening and shoved the panel closed before any of his vomit had a chance to float into the bridge. The dead Ferengi with the phaser-charred head was still floating through the room, on the same trajectory he’d been on when Q had killed him. Q tried very hard to pretend he wasn’t there. He didn’t want to touch the body, didn’t want the physical, tactile reminder that there had been a sentient being there and now there was a piece of meat because he had pressed a button on a phaser and burned the being’s face off. Funny, this was not a reaction he’d expected to have. He _had_ killed mortals before. But not when he was one. He’d been so worried about how his proficiency with a phaser could possibly work and how could he know how to shoot anybody and it turned out trajectories and angles and hand-eye coordination were all things he could do without thinking about it. He could look at a reflection approaching him and know exactly where it was in the room below him, exactly where he had to hold his phaser, exactly when he had to pull the trigger to kill the man before the other came into range to kill him. That had turned out to be child’s play. He was actually a very good shot. It was the part about now someone being dead because he’d shot them that he was having a hard time with.

_Him or me. Him or me. It was faster than you gave his family, anyway. Stop it. You’re being an idiot. How many millions, billions of mortals have you seen die? Now here you’re going to fall to pieces because you shot someone in the head with a phaser. Quit being pathetic and get back to work. You’re going to need to kill more of them before you’re done._

Now he had the bridge. “Computer, display life sign monitors on screen, overlaid on map of ship.”

“Acknowledged,” the computer said. And there they were. One in the captain’s quarters, right on the other side of the locked door. Four in engineering, including the only female Ferengi life sign. Two in the Jeffries tubes near engineering, moving toward the bridge. Three roaming around the ship, one on this deck, two headed toward the transporter room. And T’Laren, the sole Vulcan life sign, in the transporter room.

He opened a channel. “T’Laren, can you hear me?”

Her voice came through main speakers. “Q? Where are you?”

“The bridge. I’ve got control of it. What’s the situation with the transporter?”

“I couldn’t stop them from disabling it in time. I am attempting to repair it, but the situation is dangerous; the doors are stuck open and I cannot fix the transporter without turning my back to the door.”

Q tried making the transporter doors shut. “They’re broken. I can’t shut them. But I can tell you the positions of all the Ferengi on the ship. There are two headed your way.”

“Very well. Where else are they?”

“Four in engineering, one on monitors which I’m shutting down now, one on this deck but not on monitors, and two coming toward you.” He looked at his readouts. “Damn. Their other ship is actually catching up with us. I was hoping to have more time.”

“How long before it arrives?”

“Moot point, T’Laren, I’m going into warp to get away from it.” He punched in a course, and fired up the engines. Nothing happened. “Or maybe not.” A diagnostic scan revealed what was going on; they had no warp drive. It had been physically disabled. “Okay, scratch that. Someone in engineering killed warp drive.”

“Can we go to impulse?”

“There’s really no point to that. T’Laren, I need transporters back ASAP. Our weapons are pathetic. We can’t take on the Ferengi ship and right now we can’t run.”

“What good can you do with transporters? They’ll have shields up; you won’t be able to beam people off them.”

“I have a plan, trust me. But I need transporters. Oh, and those two Ferengi are going to be able to see you in the next 30 seconds unless you hide.”

“I’ll have to deal with them before I can finish fixing the transporter, then.”

“Obviously. Do what you have to do.”

“Q, can you cut off all lighting to this deck?”

“Oh. Yeah, of course. Good idea.” He killed the lights on Deck 3. As an afterthought he killed them on Deck 2 as well, where engineering was; of course there were emergency lights in engineering that weren’t under bridge control, but they were going to be harder to work with even for the Ferengi with their dim-adapted eyes.

The _Profit Margin_ came into range. Q’s heart sank. Their shields were up; they must have been expecting an acknowledgement code at the end of the test, or something. If they had waited the full hour to go to high warp to catch up, they wouldn’t be here now; they must have been pushing their engines to maximum since at _least_ the half hour mark at the start of the test. So now they were flying in, shields up, expecting trouble, and Q couldn’t run because Yalit had disabled warp, and his phasers were truly pathetic. The only advantage he had was that their mother and other family members were aboard _Ketaya_, so they wouldn’t shoot right away.

“This is the _Profit Margin_, acting DaiMon Rek in command. _Ketaya_, acknowledge! Are you all right over there?”

Q didn’t open a channel. He couldn’t afford to respond. What he needed was transporters. And _Profit Margin_ to drop its shields.

“_Ketaya,_ acknowledge! What’s going on?”

The life signs indicated that T’Laren was probably occupied fighting the Ferengi who had gone to the transporter room. He wasn’t going to get transporters for a few minutes, at least.

“_Ketaya_, explain why we just found five of the crew floating in space, or we are going to fire!”

Q raised shields, prepared to fire _Ketaya’s_ inadequate phasers, and then realized that Yalit or somebody had managed to cut them off too. He was dead in the water, no way to run, no way to fight, nothing but shields and _Profit Margin_ could just hammer on them until they went down.

“Now would be a good time to fix the transporter, T’Laren,” he muttered, but didn’t send it telepathically – she didn’t need the distraction right now.

* * *

In the darkness, T’Laren waited behind the transporter console. The two Ferengi barreled in at full speed. “Where is she?”

Interesting. They must have a means of communicating with each other, she thought, to know that she was the one in the transporter room. The monitors didn’t have infrared, so they couldn’t know exactly where she was now that Q had killed the lights.

Of course, she knew exactly where _they_ were, because she’d had half a minute to dark-adapt her eyes for seeing infrared and because they were being loud. She floated up silently in the darkness, head coming up over the console where she could see them, and fired.

She hit the first one. The second one kicked off the floor and flew across the room, returning fire and forcing her to dodge. She had the console to pull against or push off from, to alter her trajectory, so she was able to get out of the way rapidly and then change position again so the Ferengi wouldn’t be able to shoot at the places she might have dodged to. He didn’t have the same advantage. She could hear approximately where he hit the ceiling, could see where he was firing his phaser from, and knew there was nothing else he could hit on his trajectory to alter it until he got back to the floor. So she fired into his path downward. The Ferengi screamed, his phaser firing wildly at the ceiling, and then nothing.

_It’s unfortunate that you don’t seem to be trained for zero gee combat very well_, T’Laren thought, looking at the dead man as his infrared trace visibly cooled. _In a phaser battle in zero gee you should never be far from a point where you can change trajectory, or your opponent will simply track where you’re going to be and fire there._ She knew better. Basic Starfleet training, and games she’d played with her mother as a very small child, and the racial memory she carried of her mother and her mother’s mother and all the generations before her of Vulcans who had traveled in space, traders and explorers who followed the ways of Surak but rejected the planetary boundaries of Vulcan’s gravity well.

And then the ship rocked violently, and she was flung sideways at high speed. “Q! I’ve secured the transporter room again and I need lights. What’s going on?”

“We’re under attack. _Profit Margin_ seems to have found the fellows I beamed into space.” The lights came back on. “How soon can you get me a working transporter?”

“I don’t know. I thought I had rewired it correctly, but it doesn’t seem to be working.”

“Oh for the… never mind. I’ll need you to change it anyway. Look at the transporter and send me what you see.”

“I don’t know if I can do that.”

“Try.”

So she looked at the transporter, studying the tangle of wires, and attempted to transmit to Q what she was seeing. She was still amazed at being able to do this. She would never have been able to send Soram an image of what she saw.

“Okay,” he said verbally, through the coms, “I got that. Now I’m going to send you instructions for what to do.” The ship shook again. “But first I’m going to go to impulse. Hang on.”

Yalit didn’t seem to have disabled impulse too; in fact it was impossible to do that on _Ketaya_ without shutting down all power. She felt the hum of the engines firing up, and the slight jerk, offset by the inertial dampeners, as they moved forward. “That’ll buy us a couple of minutes, but probably nothing more.”

The first thing she got from him was another confused burst of tangled memory and information. _*Q, I can't understand that. Can you break it down?*_

_//impatience/fear/*We don't have time for this...*_ This time he sent a rapid-fire set of verbalized instructions, with images of what he was talking about. She did the first three things he had said, and then realized that she was completely confused.

_*Q, is this going to work? It seems like you have me wiring this thing backwards.*_

_//grim amusement/*Bingo. That’s almost exactly what you’re doing.*_

_*Can you send the instructions again? More slowly? I can’t remember them when you send them all at once, so quickly like that.*_

_*I thought Vulcans were smart.*_ The ship shook violently again. _*Dammit, they’ve caught up with us! T’Laren, I need my transporter!*_

_*Then show me how to finish what you need!*_

He sent another burst of multiple instructions. She carried out the first three again. _*Send them to me three at a time. That seems to be what I can understand when sent at once.*_

The ship shook again. The next set of instructions he sent came with fear and anxiety attached, and the knowledge that shields were about to fail. T’Laren finished that set rapidly, and transmitted the request for more before she was quite done with the last one.

_*Last part. Do these--*_ More shaking under phaser fire as he sent the last set of instructions. T’Laren ran through them as quickly as she could.

_*I’m done! What now?*_

_*You need anything out of the replicator? I need to wipe out our pattern storage database.*_

_*We can re-download at Miona Station. Do what you have to do.*_

_*Okay. Pull out a couple of your hairs and lay them carefully on one of the transport pads. Then get to engineering. See if you can secure it for me. There’s four in there.*_

She floated up and over to the transport pad, laid the hairs down, pushed away, and was sent flying into the wall by another burst of phaser fire outside. Under these circumstances she’d have to use the velcro, or she’d be thrown into a wall every time the phasers hit. She hoped Q would be able to hold off on needing engineering immediately.

What did he need to transport hair for, she wondered?

* * *

The transporter worked. He breathed a sigh of relief as he pulled up the antimatter program. It was one of the ones they’d built when they were trying to devise weapons against the Borg, based on his suggestion and expertise. He’d been greatly relieved that they hadn’t needed it – he had called it a weapon of last resort and made sure that Starfleet had known not to use it unless necessary, because if the Borg had adapted the technique it could have been disastrous.

Transporters converted matter to energy and then, using the carrier wave containing the pattern, performed the reverse transformation. In theory, once you had the energy, converting it to antimatter should be just as easy as converting it to matter. In practice, the precision level of the transport pattern preserved matter at the atomic level. To get to the quark level, which would be required in order to flip the quarks and make the substance come out as antimatter, required ten times the storage space and significantly more processing power.

To get the storage space in the computer system for the extrapolation he needed to do, he deleted everything out of the replicator pattern storage array. He ran the disassembling scan portion of the transport beam, dematerializing the hair on the platform, but did not initialize the output beam; this was going to take several minutes.

And there went his shields. The phaser fire raked _Ketaya’s_ left nacelle, half-severing the support strut. Q opened a channel. “Don’t shoot! We surrender!”

DaiMon Rek appeared on his viewscreen. “_Where is my mother?_” he snarled.

“Yalit’s in engineering. She disabled my phasers and warp drive. You can run a life sign scan to prove she’s okay – she’s the only female Ferengi aboard.”

“How did five of my brothers and nephews end up floating dead in space?”

This had to be done carefully or it had the potential to backfire on Q _really_ badly. “Fortunes of war,” he said with a shrug, smirking. “Sorry about that.”

The man went purple. “We are beaming aboard to take control of your bridge. Prepare to be boarded!”

The transmission cut. Q was breathing hard. If they boarded all over the ship, he was dead. By smirking at them as he told them he’d killed their family, he had tried to provoke them into coming directly to the bridge, where they’d be able to immediately capture and punish _him_. Sometimes being a walking target for violent beings’ violent tendencies could come in handy. It sounded like the plan had worked.

Now to enact the rest of his plan. His process was done and ready to beam out. As _Profit Margin’s_ shields dropped, so they could beam over here, Q activated the beam-out to transport the antimatter-converted hairs over there. Three pillars of light appeared on the bridge. Q set his phaser to overload while kicking off for the ceiling. He yanked the panel down and flung his overloading phaser down toward the three materializing Ferengi. As the men solidified, he pulled himself into the Jeffries tube overhead and threw himself sideways, directly through the floating globs of vomit he’d left there before. Behind him there was an explosion, and the shockwave actually shoved him down the tube some distance as overheated air from the explosion rose up and then expanded into the tube. Then the ship shook violently in the other direction, thrown off course and spinning around. Without artificial gravity, the inertial dampeners couldn’t fully handle the load, and the Jeffries tube actually rotated around Q, until the wall of the tube hit him and sent him flying the short distance to the other wall. Q threw out his arms and legs to catch himself, bracing himself against the tube until the ship stopped shaking.

He reoriented himself and threw himself down through the opening, back down to the bridge. The panel that should close the opening, which he hadn’t had time to shut behind him before the phaser exploded, had been torn loose and was floating around the bridge, as was one of the three Ferengi… no, actually, it was only the head and torso of the Ferengi, trailing blood and fecal matter as he floated limply through the air, his entire lower body gone and nothing left to hold anything in his torso. The other two Ferengi who’d beamed over weren’t even visible until Q realized that the walls were painted the color of Ferengi blood, and a light crunchy paste of tiny, tiny fragments of bone and liquefied flesh was covering the consoles that hadn’t been destroyed in the blast.

Q was partially in shock, numb to the horror of what he’d just caused. His viewscreen was gone, but miraculously sensors were still up. Previously _Profit Margin_ had shown fifteen life-signs. Now _Profit Margin_ wasn’t there at all, just some random debris in space. T’Laren’s hair had made just enough antimatter to blow the other small ship to bits without seriously damaging _Ketaya_, just as he’d calculated. Even better, none of those fifteen life signs were showing on _Ketaya_ right now. Two Ferengi were in the Jeffries tube from engineering, heading his way, just as they’d been before, probably having been slowed down a good bit by all the shaking but they were moving at a good clip now. Two were in the captain’s quarters/monitor room, again, and they were apparently cutting through the locked door to the bridge with their phasers. And four were in engineering. The same number of Ferengi as had been there before he’d blown up _Profit Margin_ were still there.

The smell hit him then. For several moments he had only been able to smell ozone from the ionized air, but now a wave of the smell of blood, feces and burned flesh hit him. The detachment he’d been able to manage so far dissolved, as the impact of what he’d just done hit him fully. There was nothing in his stomach, so when he doubled over retching anyway, at least nothing came out. Not that it helped, with the air full of blobs of liquid Ferengi innards.

He didn’t want to do this anymore. He didn’t want to kill any more of these people.

For a moment he had a fantasy of staying exactly where he was, doing nothing, until either the team cutting the door or the team coming through the Jeffries tubes caught him, and they would probably kill him, and then he wouldn’t see the half Ferengi body floating around and the badly shredded remains of the corpse whose face he’d burned off and the patina of flesh and bone covering everything. But no. _You’re going to give up and die because you’re a bad person? What an idiot. It’s three million years too late to be a good person, Q. If you were going to lay down and die out of guilt for killing mortals, maybe you should have killed yourself aboard the Enterprise after all._

But he didn’t want to do what he was going to have to do to save himself.

He couldn’t unlock the observation deck door, because the Ferengi on the bridge’s attempt to cut through it had damaged it and fused the locking mechanism. The transport platform would take him into engineering, also swarming with Ferengi. So he had no escape route unless he removed his pursuers from either the Jeffries tube or the captain’s quarters’ door. And he had no phaser any more, so it would have to be the transporter. But the antimatter protocol couldn’t handle anything larger than a kilo. He purged the program, restoring the usual matter-based process. The problem now was that the rewiring he’d had T’Laren do had destroyed all the usual safety protocols, including the discriminate matter protocol that made sure only whole objects would be picked up in the beam. Which meant he couldn’t take the guys who had an active phaser, because if he accidentally cut a working phaser in half it would explode, and the shrapnel from the exploding door would rip him to bits.

With shaking hands, he focused the transporter on the Ferengi above him. They were actually in the stretch above the bridge now, moments from reaching him. Q activated the transport. There were horrible, horrible high-pitched screams over his head, and then silence. Q looked up. There was a hole in the bulkhead over his head – he had aimed the beam low rather than high to avoid accidentally transporting part of the hull, so he’d gotten the floor of the tube, his own ceiling, instead.

Q took a hit off his oxygen tank, the smell in the room almost paralyzing him with nausea even though he had vomited everything in his guts up. A few deep breaths of pure O2, and he was able to kick off for the hole in the Jeffries tube.

Floating in the tube was a severed Ferengi head and a few centimeters of shoulder on one side of the hole, knees and lower legs of a different Ferengi on the other. There was so much blood in the tube he needed to close his eyes and find his way blind, and he had to hold his breath because the blood would have choked him otherwise. He found his way to the turn down and kicked off down it, finally able to open his eyes and breathe, just as he heard the doors to the bridge bang open behind him.

The power went out. That had to be Yalit, recognizing that leaving the power up, and thus leaving Q free to use the transporter, was deadly. That didn’t bother him so much; he’d gone through the tubes in the dark before. And then he heard screams behind him, and one voice yelling “Focus! Focus the light up ahead so we can get the bastard! Stop, stop shining it on Tak’s head, _stop…_”

They had lights. Dammit. Q took another hit off his oxygen tank, and then curled into a ball around the tank so he could use it for propulsion. His back was in the direction he needed to go, his knees slightly apart to give the air somewhere to escape to, one arm wrapped around the tank holding it to his chest and one hand ready to release the valve.

He could still hear the Ferengi’s cries of outraged horror. They’d found their other relative’s legs. If they caught Q, it was unlikely he’d survive it. Q released the valve and the oxygen shot out, pushing him at high speed down the tube toward the bottom of _Ketaya_. He kept one hand out to keep from hitting the walls, occasionally kicking the wall to steer and speed himself even more, shooting all the way down the main shaft to Deck 4. In the dark he misjudged the distance and ended up slamming into the bottom of the shaft, hard. The oxygen tank fell out of his armhold and began spinning around, whacking Q in the head before he managed to catch it and shut the valve.

A phaser shot seared the wall next to him. Q yelped and dove up for the opening to the lateral tube that ran along Deck 4. He needed a phaser, and he needed to stay out of the way of his pursuers. Belatedly he wished he’d recovered the phaser of the guy whose face he’d burned off, but he’d been too much in shock to think of it at the time. The ones chasing him lacked a tank of gas to use as a means of propulsion, so they couldn’t move as fast, but it had been a mistake for him to go straight down a single shaft where they could use their hand lamps and superior hearing to detect that he was in line of sight, and shoot at him. In the dark and with the entire height of _Ketaya_ between him and them, their accuracy was lousy, but it would only take one lucky hit. He turned the canister back on and shot down the narrower lateral tube, until he overshot the opening and had to catch it with his feet.

Q kicked open the panel and crawled out into the corridor. The armory was here on Deck 4 with the rest of the storage. If the Ferengi hadn’t already stolen all the phasers, he could get one, and then the lights the Ferengi were carrying would show them to him and let him shoot them before they could use the lights to find and shoot _him_.

Of course, odds were that they _had_ stolen all the phasers, but with the power off, he had no access to the transporter. The phasers in the armory were his only hope.

* * *

The door to engineering was closed. T’Laren could hear Yalit shouting orders. “…completely gut the transporter controls, so we can get the power back on and _find_ them!”

Now she was glad Q had given her an extra phaser. She detached herself from the velcro, floating down toward the floor. Gently she kicked off the wall with her bare feet, so that even Ferengi hearing couldn’t catch it, what with Yalit shouting and the closed door in the way. A few pushes later, she was halfway down the corridor. Sickbay’s doors, by design, would open in the lack of power rather than shut. She swung into Sickbay and touched the ceiling with one velcro knee, holding herself in place, as she set one of her two phasers to overload. Then she leaned out the door and threw it down the hall at the door to engineering with all her strength, quickly ducking back into Sickbay, where its wall would protect her from the blast.

A violent explosion. Shouting. Yalit’s voice. “They’re here! Form a circle, fire outward!”

A clever idea. With the doors to engineering blasted open, T’Laren could see three Ferengi in a triangle, shining lanterns out into the darkness of the corridor, and firing phasers. But they were firing solely in the plane of the floor and the two meters above it, and their feet clanked on the floor with the repeated thudding of magnetic boots. They were slow, tethered down even more than gravity would hold them, and they were still not thinking in three dimensions. In the center of the triangle, spillover from the lantern showed the dim shape of a very tiny, naked Ferengi floating untethered to the floor. At least Yalit could handle zero gee; well, either that, or she was sticking to her beliefs about women being naked even when wearing magnetic boots would be helpful.

_*Q. How many are there left? I see four in front of me.*_

_//breathing hard, exertion/anxiety near panic but focus/*The two chasing me. I think that’s all.*_

_*Where are you?*_

_*Deck 4. Trying to get to the armory.*_

_*I can’t get there quickly with no power.*_

_*Take engineering and get the power on. The bridge barely works but engineering has almost all the same controls, and you have computer voice access. Get the power on and you can do anything Yalit didn’t physically disable.*_

_*If there are only four left… I want to stun them./i want to kill i want to break their bones but i don’t want to want/If I have Yalit stunned, I can hold her hostage against the last two.*_

_//relief/*Yes. Yes, stun them./oh please so tired of killing people/mortal death is so disgusting and they’re just like us but i’m killing them it’s like killing a q when i was one it hurts i want to stop//*_

She was surprised. Q had been so adamant that they had to kill, so cold and unconcerned with any moral issues. But the emotions she felt from him now were disgust, largely with himself, and overwhelming guilt. Her motivations for wanting not to kill came from Vulcan pacifism, logic, and her personal desire to _not_ feel blood lust, to _not_ enjoy committing murder. But Q’s reaction seemed to be entirely emotional, and in fact he almost seemed ashamed of the intensity of his own guilt.

_*All right. I’ll use stun.*_ She adjusted her phaser.

The triangle was rotating slowly around Yalit, but staying in engineering. That was unfortunate. Had they spread out or come her way, she could just have waited until they got to sickbay and then ducked out and stunned them. Now she was going to have to go in there. Very slowly T’Laren eased her way under the door jamb, caught the velcro in the hallway and lay almost flat against the ceiling, inching forward bit by bit.

Their lanterns occasionally illuminated the air just under her, so obviously they had considered she might be floating high, but they didn’t seem to consider the possibility that she was flat on the ceiling. T’Laren recalled briefings on the Ferengi after the Federation finally made visual contact with the then-mysterious race. They were understood to have purchased 90% of their technology, including the very concept of the warp drive. Perhaps the Ferengi had _never_ had space travel in zero gee; perhaps they’d bought artificial gravity before even going to space. Q’s idea of shutting down artificial gravity had really been very helpful.

Carefully, slowly, T’Laren took aim, waiting until all of them were specifically focused down. She pulled off one of her velcro mitts and flung it at the wall, a distance away from her, angled so it would fall into the plane where people would walk if there were gravity.

The mitt hit the wall with a faint chuff. Ferengi hearing picked it up instantly, the lights all turned on her mitt and the phasers all fired. And in that moment when they were all committed to looking away from her, she fired down at their heads. One. Two. Yalit looked up. Three. The last one fired wildly toward her, but missed. And that was four.

She kicked free of the velcro and shoved off at full speed into engineering, where the dim emergency lights were plenty for her to see by.

Immediately she could see what had happened to the power. Yalit had simply removed all the dilithium crystals. T’Laren retrieved a magnetic belt from one of the unconscious Ferengi and locked herself to the console so she could hook the crystals in.

It had been a controlled shutdown, not a short circuit that blew out the crystals, so it wasn’t necessary to do a cold intermix to get the power on. The moment she had two-thirds of the crystals in, it came up on her own. She put in the rest of them quickly, figuring that if Q needed transporters they’d need maximum power capacity.

Then she used a control console to get life sign readings for the ship, and went cold. The one human reading and the two Ferengi readings on Deck 4 were on top of each other. T’Laren opened the link, and was immediately hit with overwhelming terror, exhaustion, despair and terrible pain.

They had Q.

* * *

Q ran.

It was more like leaping and flying short distances than running; he kept using bursts of oxygen to get him back onto the floor, or return him to a wall, or someplace he could kick off from so he could keep up his momentum. He was also breathing off the oxygen tank every other breath, which was slowing him down, but his chest had finally succumbed to the low oxygen density and burned with leaden pain every time he tried to breathe without it. There were storage rooms and maintenance closets all over the place, and if there were power he could hide in one of them, but he couldn’t get the doors open under these circumstances.

The armory was halfway from the Jeffries tubes under the front of the ship to the airlock in the back. Q fumbled his way to it in the dark, getting lost and first undershooting, then overshooting, before he got it. The door was locked, of course, so he had to feel around for the exterior manual release, and it didn’t work anyway. Then Q remembered that the armory had a second, hidden manual release, for safety. He had to feel around for that, too, and then put in a three digit code using a physical dial with a very tiny emergency light above it so he could barely make out the numbers.

He heard shouting down the corridor. They were here. Q yanked the door to the armory closet open, reached inside… and found nothing.

Of course. The Ferengi _had_, in fact, stolen all the phasers.

A moment or two of feeling around confirmed it. No weapons. He wondered if everything he had had in the storage rooms had been stolen too, and if that stuff had been on _Profit Margin_ if it was, but he couldn’t devote much time to it because the Ferengi would have him in line of sight if the lights were on. Their lanterns didn’t reach this far, but they would when they got closer. He had to get out of here.

Leaving the empty armory’s door open, he kicked off down the hall. The oxygen tank would be too loud, so he didn’t use it, but the clank of his shipboots hitting the floor or wall as he kicked sounded horribly loud, and apparently the Ferengi could hear it because they kept shooting at where he had just been after he pushed off. He was using the oxy tank to breathe off of so he wouldn’t audibly gasp… until the tank ran out. And then the thing wasn’t worth anything to him, so he threw it toward the Ferengi in hopes that it would hit one of them, and kept going. He had to get to the other entrance to the Jeffries tube, near the airlock.

And then the lights came on.

“There he is!” one of them screamed from down the hall, well within phaser range, and Q swallowed and closed his eyes, because he was dead. They couldn’t miss him at this range.

“Stop or we’ll shoot!” one yelled.

“You’ll shoot anyway,” Q called back, unable to change his trajectory or stop even if he’d wanted to, since he hadn’t reached a wall yet.

And then a burst of phaser fire hit him in the leg. Q screamed, pain more searing and intense than even the neurowhip sheeting through him. He tumbled, rolling, unable to control any of his motions through the mind-destroying pain, and the only thing he could think was that the next shot was going to be the last thing he ever felt.

Instead a weight tackled him, slamming him into the wall. Q cried out in pain again, and then he was being spun around and there were fists in his face, his stomach and his chest, repeatedly slamming him back against the bulkhead.

They were shouting at him. “You happy now? You killed my brothers, my uncles, my cousins, you killed my father! Are you happy now? Didn’t do you any good, did it?”

He didn’t beg. That was the one thing he clung to as he felt ribs crack and teeth loosen. He couldn’t stop himself from crying out, from gasping and whimpering and occasionally screaming, but he managed not to beg. There would be absolutely no point to begging, because he really had killed their relatives in some fairly horrible ways, and begging for mercy would only whet their appetite for revenge. They were going to beat him to death no matter what he said, and the pain in his leg was so bad he couldn’t focus on fighting back.

And then one of them said, “No, Frej. Stop hitting him. I’ve got an idea. He transported everyone on the bridge except for poor Antek into space. The airlocks are right down there. Why don’t we throw _him_ into space?”

“Yeah. Yeah, let’s do that.” The man punched him again in the face. “Not so high and mighty now, are you, hyuu-mon?”

The whole ship was spinning around him. The Ferengi took his arms and leapt, frog-marching him down the hallway, and his head kept hitting the ceiling on the up-bounce because he was taller than they were and they weren’t bothering to put out their free hands to push off from the ceiling until after he’d already hit. Although the lights were on now, Q could barely see, shock and pain making his vision a tunnel hazed in gray. He hurt so much he was almost looking forward to being thrown out the airlock. Dying of vacuum was not pleasant, but maybe it would be better than living with his leg like this. He thought maybe he would lose the leg, and never walk freely again without prosthetics, and then he remembered that his captors were about to kill him, which made his concern rather irrelevant. Pain made him sob, but at least he wasn’t begging.

And then gravity hit, and Q fell hard to the floor, and for a moment he blacked out from the pain. When he came back to himself he heard T’Laren’s voice. “…and push them along the floor, so you cannot reach them.”

“I—I can’t move,” one of the Ferengi gasped.

Q tried to get up and found that he was far, far too heavy. His neck didn’t even have the strength to lift his head off the floor. When he turned it so he could see the Ferengi, he could see that they were in the same position, flat against the floor.

It was so hard to breathe. Between the pain, the thin air, and the incredible weight of his own body pressing on his lungs, Q thought he would probably black out again. But T’Laren had control of engineering. He had to stay conscious. She might need his help. Q forced himself to breathe deeply, struggling against the weight of his chest.

“Your mother’s head is under my boot,” T’Laren’s voice came over the comm system. “I need only rest my full weight on that foot, in this gravity, and her skull will be crushed.”

Some part of that was a bluff. Q knew that T’Laren wasn’t enough stronger than the Ferengi to be standing freely without support in a gravity field that was crushing them, and him, against the floor. It was much more likely, given her penchant for altering the gravity in specific rooms to be more intense, that she was manipulating the gravity on this deck only. On the other hand, in normal gravity she could still crush Yalit’s skull with a hard stomp.

“No!”

“No, please! Leave her alone!”

“Then leave the phasers near Q, and crawl away from him. I will lower the gravity very slightly to facilitate this. Failure to do exactly as I say will cause your mother’s death.”

“How do we even know she’s alive?” one asked indignantly.

“She is unconscious, as I have stunned her. If you would like to hear her voice to confirm that she lives, I could kick her until she awakes. I am sure that after several of her ribs snap she will recover enough from stun to be able to scream.”

“_No!_”

“No, don’t hurt her!”

“Then do as I say. _Now._”

Pleading with T’Laren not to hurt their mother, the two Ferengi crawled, slowly, away from their phasers and away from Q, leaving the phasers near Q’s sides.

“Q. Can you hear me?”

_*Yes. But I can’t breathe, so don’t expect me to yell it out.*_

“I am going to lower the gravity. Will you be able to sit up and confiscate the phasers?”

“Yes,” he said weakly, barely able to force the word out against the weight, because what choice did he have? He wasn’t actually in any shape to do this, but T’Laren couldn’t keep control of engineering if she had to come down here to collect some phasers from prisoners. Surely he could stay conscious long enough to hold some phasers.

Then the gravity let up, and he was able to sit. He felt suddenly light-headed in the removal of the weight. The air was returning to Earth normal too, cooling and turning richer, easier to breathe. Q reached for the two phasers, carefully trying to avoid putting pressure on his burned leg.

“Both of you. Proceed to Storage Room 3 and enter it. If you hesitate I will kill Yalit.”

The two Ferengi headed for the nearest storage room, presumably 3, and ran inside, babbling pleas not to hurt their mother. The storage room doors opened as they entered, and then clicked, locking.

“Q,” T’Laren’s voice said. “I’m lowering the gravity to lunar standard. Can you make it to sickbay on your own?”

Q tried, carefully, to get himself up. The pain in his ribs was bad, but bearable if he had to move. The moment he put any pressure at all on his burned leg, though, as he tried to get himself into a crawling position, the pain went from a red-hot agonized throbbing to a white flare that wiped out his consciousness for a moment, and when he came to himself he was lying on the floor again, on his side. “No,” he gasped. “I can’t get up at all.”

“What happened? I know you’re hurt, but not how.”

“Phaser. To my left leg.” He swallowed, trying not to sob. “It’s… it’s completely black, from just above my knee down to right above my ankle. I don’t… I think I’ll probably lose it.”

“Well, don’t panic. If it’s necessary to give you a new leg, Federation doctors can probably give you a new one the way they gave you a new alimentary canal when you drank acid, by cloning and replacing the tissue. Just sit and try to remain as calm as you can. I’ll be there to help you to sickbay in a few minutes, and we’ll give you some painkillers.”

“How can we do that? I deleted the replicator database! There’s no more meds of any kind on the ship!” A sob did escape him then at the thought that he would have to endure this pain until they got to Miona Station, which on impulse only would be days, and with him too badly hurt to inspect the damaged warp nacelle, they didn’t dare go to warp even if T’Laren got warp working again. Oh, and there wasn’t any food either, so they would go hungry for days, too.

“Don’t worry. The medical database is backed up on every medical tricorder. We will be able to give you medicine. Now I’m going offline so I can lock up these Ferengi and get to you. Try to stay calm until I get there.”

He lay on his back, breathing deeply, trying not to cry, although small whimpers of pain kept escaping his lips. This actually felt a lot like the acid had, except that he wasn’t dying of it so he had to remain alive and conscious to endure the pain. For a moment he almost wished the Ferengi had succeeded in spacing him. The men he’d killed might have died in horrifying ways, but none of them had suffered more than a minute or two of pain.

He heard motion and carefully levered himself back into a sitting position, gasping at the pain in his abdomen and chest from the beating he’d suffered. T’Laren was coming down the hallway, carrying three unconscious Ferengi, in the light lunar-type gravity. She had one slung over one shoulder and the other two tied together, carrying them by the magnetic cable she’d bound them with. When she reached Storage Room 2, across the hall from the room they’d locked the other Ferengi in, she opened the door, tossed them in, and locked it.

“Where’s Yalit?” Q asked.

“I locked her in one of the crew quarters. I thought it best to keep her isolated.”

“Good. Why not put them all in crew quarters? Don’t we have anything in the storage rooms?”

“Apparently not any longer. They’re empty.” She reached him and knelt to inspect his leg. “That does look unpleasant. Can I help you get to Sickbay?”

“Is there any way you can get me those painkillers before you move me? Any time the leg even changes position, I nearly pass out.”

“All right.” She went over to Sickbay, and came back with a medical tricorder. “While I’m downloading the medical database to the replicator, I should scan you.”

“Don’t tell me if I’m going to lose the leg,” Q said. “Just let me go to sleep and wake up without it.”

She scanned him. “Well, the good news is that you may not have to lose the leg. They shot you on burn setting, not on kill, so most of the damage is to skin and outer layers of muscle. There are still nerves and blood vessels intact and reaching your foot.”

“They’d used the phasers last to burn through the door to the bridge, so I suppose that makes sense.”

“That, and it would be easier to take you alive on burn setting. They would only have killed you if they’d hit your head or heart, whereas a phaser on kill will kill if it hits anywhere on your torso or upper legs. And disabling you with pain rather than knocking you unconscious is consistent with the things they were saying about you in engineering.”

“If they wanted to take me alive so bad, why’d they decide to throw me out the airlock?”

“Perhaps overwhelmed by rage? Perhaps they wanted you alive so they could kill you more slowly or personally.” She stood up. “I’ll go get you some medications. I can’t actually treat your leg, but I can bandage and sterilize it and give you painkillers and healing accelerators.”

“Painkillers first before you touch it, please.”

She went to sickbay again and came back with medical supplies. The painkiller was such an intense relief, he almost passed out again just from no longer needing to struggle against pain. “Oh, thank you,” he sighed. “That is infinitely better.”

“Can you walk now? With my help?”

Again he tried to get up, but even with the painkiller, shards of agony shot through him when he tried to stand. “No,” he said, gasping. “Sorry.”

“All right. Hang onto my neck.” She lifted him, one arm supporting his back and the other under his upper legs, almost forming a chair.

He put his arms around her to stabilize himself. “Oh, you’re so butch,” he said in an archly campy voice.

“You do realize I couldn’t do this in Earth normal gravity.”

“I thought a big strong Vulcan lass like you could sling skinny little humans around all day.”

“Perhaps, but at two meters tall you are hardly a skinny _little_ human. You still mass 75 kilos.”

“Technically, I’m only 193 centimeters. I thought you people were supposed to be so precise.”

She laid him carefully on a bed in Sickbay. “If I had been speaking to a Vulcan, no doubt I would have used greater precision.”

“I’m smarter than a Vulcan.”

“And thus you’re quite intelligent enough to know that my point isn’t affected by seven centimeters in either direction.” She used a sonic shear to slice off his pants above the knee, exposing the damaged leg. Next she ran a sterilizer ray over the leg, quickly. Finally she took a long, wide rectangle of gray material covered on one side with thick goo, and wrapped it tightly around his leg, locking his knee in place. The gray color changed to match the exact color of the unburned flesh right above his knee.

“What is that?”

“It’s a bandage with regenerative gel. As the burned skin and flesh splits open, the regenerative gel will get into the cracks and speed your healing. An actual doctor will probably use sonics to remove the damaged flesh and then rebandage you, but my goal is simply to keep the burn from killing the healthy tissue and causing gangrene before you can see a doctor.”

“Well, I suppose that’s better than gangrene. Can I walk on it like this?”

“No. I’ll find your hoverchair. You remember, we packed it because you tired so easily when you first came aboard.”

“The Ferengi probably stole it, too.”

“The Ferengi most likely to have taken it was Yalit herself, so it is quite possibly in the captain’s quarters now. I’ll question her.”

“What are we going to do with them?”

“Once you’ve got a hoverchair, you can come with me to engineering, and help me get warp back on line. Then we’ll go to Miona Station, hire repair techs for the ship, buy more dilithium, download a replicator database, and drop off the Ferengi when we’re ready to leave.”

“Oh.” A horrifying thought suddenly hit Q, and he sagged back against the medical bed. “Oh, no. We can’t do that. We have to kill them. Or at least Yalit and the engineers.”

“Why?” T’Laren frowned. “If this is about revenge—“

“No.” He closed his eyes. “No, I don’t – I don’t _want_ to kill anyone else. But Yalit knows far too much about transwarp.” He opened his eyes and looked at her. “Quite aside from my entirely selfish reasons to not want to anger the Q Continuum, the Continuum is _right_ about this. Someone inventing dynamic transwarp right now will play holy hell with the power balance of the Alpha Quadrant. I _can’t_ let her go with that knowledge.”

“There’s another way. We don’t have to kill her, Q. We can erase her memories.”

“She’s not accessible to your telepathy.”

“I’m well aware of that. It’s a psychological technique. Mindwipes of specific traumatic events used to be done fairly often as a treatment for post-traumatic stress. The technique has fallen out of favor, but it’s possible to use it to wipe out learned knowledge as well as experiential memories.”

“Can you administer that? You’re a counselor, not a psychiatrist.”

“I was trained by Starfleet Intelligence. Yes. I can administer the technique. But once Yalit is under and suggestible and her mind is prepared for erasures, you will have to be the one to tell her what to forget. The way it works is that we use drugs, light patterns and a specific tone to induce a state where the subject will forget everything that is spoken to them. The PTSD survivors would usually tell the story of their experience, in detail, and the story would be recorded and played back to them when they were in the erasure state. In this case, you’ll explain to her what you explained to her before, and that will cause her to forget it.”

Q smiled maliciously. “Oh. Well, that’s very helpful. I really didn’t want to _kill_ any more Ferengi, but… I could really enjoy erasing Yalit’s memories.”

“I’m not suggesting this so you can have revenge.”

“No, of course not. It’s the merciful thing to do. We can protect the galaxy from the knowledge she tortured out of me, and still spare her life. It’s a great idea.” His smile got bigger. “The fact that it’s also a perfect revenge is just a bonus.”

“We killed almost her entire family. Isn’t that vengeance enough?”

“No.” Q lost the smile. “That was war, T’Laren. I wouldn’t have killed them all just to get revenge. If I’d known how it would make me feel to kill mortals now that I am one, I wouldn’t have wanted to kill _any_ of them for revenge. I did that, we did that, because we had to. And yes. Beaming people into space, or blasting them to bits with an overloading phaser… those are really ugly ways to kill people. But when you’re outnumbered ten to one, you have no _choice._ You don’t have the luxury of clean one-on-one battles. We couldn’t have won any other way.” He shook his head. “We’d have had to do it if she’d treated us perfectly well but still planned to kill or enslave us. It wasn’t revenge. Whereas erasing everything she forced me to teach her… _that_ will be fun.”

“I think all of this is tragic, actually. She accomplished so much in her life, overcame so many obstacles… and then she threw it all away to commit a criminal act, and lost more than half of her children and grandchildren.”

“More than three-fourths. _Profit Margin_ had fifteen Ferengi on it before I blew it up.”

“How did you do that with the transporter and my hair, anyway? I’d meant to ask you.”

“I converted it to antimatter with the transporter, and then beamed it over there.”

Her eyes went wide. “I didn’t know that was possible.”

“Neither did the folks on Starbase 56 until I pushed them into figuring out how to do it.”

* * *

The hoverchair turned out to be in the captain’s quarters, along with a sizable quantity of gold-pressed latinum, perhaps 20 bars of it. Q demanded enough stimulants to keep him up and awake long enough to mindwipe Yalit and fix the warp drive, and under the circumstances T’Laren couldn’t refuse him; he was right that he was needed for these things. But she didn’t like the look of his leg, and she would much prefer that he rest until they got to a doctor.

First they repaired the warp drive. Getting it back on was easy; Yalit had just uncoupled a safety, without which _Ketaya_ would not go to warp. The damage to the nacelle was harder to deal with, but Q showed her how to reroute force field projectors in the hull to temporarily replace the damaged portion of the strut, so they would safely be able to warp long enough to get to a place they could get real repairs done, like the station up ahead.

Then they had to confront Yalit.

She was lying on the bed in her cell, her hand clenched around handfuls of shiny metal jewelry that some of the Ferengi guards T’Laren had seen had worn, sobbing. When T’Laren, and Q in the hoverchair, entered the room, she looked up, eyes red, wet and ringed with dark circles of sleeplessness.

“Come to kill me like you killed my boys?” she snarled through her tears.

T’Laren shook her head. “We don’t kill unarmed prisoners. We will release you and your surviving family on Miona Station. But to do that we must remove your knowledge of transwarp. Q and I will perform a procedure on you to eliminate your memories of transwarp, and then we can release you.”

“No.” Yalit sat up and shook her head violently. “Kill me. I’m not gonna cooperate with you. You killed my _boys_… my poor little boys…”

“Oh, boo-hoo for your poor little boys,” Q said harshly. “Your poor little boys who wanted to drug an innocent woman so they’d have more fun raping her? Those poor little boys?”

“They only wanted to fuck her!” Yalit snapped. “You _beamed them into space!_”

T’Laren drew a sharp breath. But Q didn’t wait for her to speak on her own behalf. “Where they took less than a couple of minutes to die. What you _planned_ to do to T’Laren, what you would have done if I’d never demanded that you help her or if I hadn’t been able to help her myself, would have killed her, slowly and in agony over _days_, because you didn’t _know_ that she needed a mindmeld.” He floated his chair forward, advancing on Yalit. “But that wouldn’t have mattered. We weren’t planning on escaping and killing you all just because of what you did to T’Laren and what you made her do to me. But you were going to kill us both, weren’t you? Or at the very least, sell us off into captivity we would never escape from. It came down to us, or them.”

“I never said I was going to do that! I told you we’d let your woman go!”

“Oh, don’t _lie_ to me, Yalit. Why would you have told me she was going to the Bolian homeworld when in fact she was going to Miona Station?” He threw his arms in the air, and then leaned forward in his chair. “But let’s give you the benefit of the doubt. Let’s assume that, after you _kidnapped_ me for supposedly trying to damage your scientific reputation, you were perfectly willing to return T’Laren and me to the Federation, because you were too much of a _moron_ to realize that as soon as we told anyone that you had T’Laren drugged to facilitate raping her, your reputation would be _permanently_ destroyed and you would be blackened as a criminal, slaver, trafficker and rapist. So which is it, Yalit? Were you going to kill us, or was I right about every unflattering thing I said about your intellect?”

“All right!” Yalit shouted. “Yes, I had a merchant lined up for your girlfriend who was going into Romulan space anyway, and the Roms pay a lot for captive Vulcans. And I had a buyer from the Ceuli lined up for you.” She grinned viciously. “You were wrong, you know. I told the Ceuli what bids I’d gotten from the Roms and the Cardies for you, and they were _more_ than happy to beat it.”

Q rolled his eyes. “They’re not that rich. If they could beat the Romulans’ bid, it’s probably because they were going to kill you and take their money back as soon as they had me.”

“Maybe, maybe not. They were eager to pay. Fell all over themselves thanking me for catching you for them. You must have _really_ pissed them off. What’d you do, blow up their planet?”

“Gave them shapechanging powers, actually. For which you can see they’ve been eternally grateful.” Q made a dismissive gesture. “That’s not the point anyway. You were willing to see me killed horribly because I _insulted_ you. You were willing to not only let your own sons rape T’Laren, who never did _anything_ to you, but you were willing to sell her into slavery, rape and forced impregnation, apparently for the high crimes of being female and my friend. You didn’t have to kidnap us, you didn’t have to commit a crime against us that the Federation would find unforgivable. You chose to do those things, and that’s why your sons are dead. I may have been the weapon, Yalit, but you pulled the trigger.”

“Come with us,” T’Laren said coldly. “We will be at Miona Station in four hours. The mindwipe will take at least one.”

Yalit shook her head. “No. You can kill me if you’re gonna. I’m not doing anything to help you.”

“That is unfortunate,” T’Laren said. “You have five remaining male descendants on this ship. If you do not cooperate, I’ll have to start killing them.”

Yalit went pale. “Who’s left?”

“I don’t know their names,” Q said. “It’s the three goons you had with you in engineering and the two that shot me in the leg.”

Her lips moved, as if reciting names under her breath. “You bitch,” she finally breathed at T’Laren. “You absolute bitch.”

T’Laren examined Yalit for a moment, controlling the urge to commit violence. _She_ was a bitch? “Do you know the difference between Ferengi and Vulcan women?” she said finally.

“We’re better in bed?” Yalit said snidely.

“As you have seen, Vulcans can be compelled to need a lover’s body, or die. In nature, however, this is a burden men carry; women usually only endure it when bonded to a man. So, consider. Our men will literally die without the use of our bodies, and yet they have never enslaved us as yours did you. We have never been, as a class, property of men, never been treated as wombs without minds, never been forbidden education or in fact any profession. Do you know why?”

“Do I care?”

“Because we are not traitors to our own,” T’Laren said relentlessly. “Because we do not sacrifice other women’s bodies for the amusement of our men. Because we stand together.” She loomed over Yalit, who shrank back on the bed. “In the days when we made war, Vulcan women might freely kill other women who were enemies of our tribe. But we did not let our men take them captive and rape them. We did not ally with our men to subjugate other women of our own tribe. And thus we were never slaves like you.” Now she was bending over Yalit as the woman cringed. “Because you did what you did to me, you and your sisters are slaves. Because Ferengi women will betray other women to curry the favor of men, you will never be free. Every terrible thing that happened to you at the hands of your men is your fault for being a traitor, you and all your kind.” She stepped back. “Tell me, Yalit, did your daughters have the opportunities in life you won for yourself? Did you even _have_ daughters? Or did you abort them all?”

“It’s none of your business!” Yalit said, panic in her voice.

“Every time I think of what your sons wanted to do to me, I long to take a knife and slice them open slowly. Q may be sickened by violence, but…” Very deliberately, very coldly, she smiled, knowing the effect a smile on a Vulcan had on most people. “The drugs you gave me have made me _like_ it. Please, refuse my request. I will be sure to tell your sons that you knew the consequences I had promised to you for them, and you refused me anyway, as I gut them and bind them with their own innards and hang them from my shower head to drip their blood into my bathtub.”

“No,” Yalit whispered.

“Then you will cooperate with the mindwipe.”

“Yes.”

“Very well.” She backed up another step. “Get up.” Yalit didn’t. “You will walk, or I will carry you.”

Q winced. “Did you have to use that _exact_ phrase?”

Yalit climbed slowly off the bed. “I’ll walk,” she said dully.

T’Laren marched Yalit in front of her all the way to sickbay. Behind her, Q made an expression of amazement. “Really, T’Laren. I had no idea you could be so _vicious._ Color me impressed.”

She looked at him. “Don’t be. You are a better person for flinching at murder as you do. I don’t _like_ having such violent desires, but until I am fully recovered from _pon farr_, this is who I am.”

In sickbay, she made the preparations, strapping Yalit to a chair, administering the drug, strapping a headset with brain wave inducers to the woman’s head and covering her eyes with it. And then she couldn’t find the headphones.

“Q, I may not be able to do this until we get to Miona Station and I can download the full replicator database.”

Q shook his head. “We can’t go to Miona Station, T’Laren.”

“We have to. We need to take on a replicator database, or we’ll have nothing to eat but emergency rations.”

“If we can download the database without physically touching the station, fine. But we’re going to have to repair the transporter and transport the Ferengi, because we _cannot_ dock.”

“Why not?”

“Didn’t you hear what Yalit said about the Ceuli?”

“That she planned to sell you to them, yes.”

Q took a deep breath. “The Ceuli are shapechangers. They can turn into anything made of matter in a liquid or solid form. If we dock, they could impersonate someone to get aboard, they could get in through the air exchange vents, there are any number of ways and we can’t protect ourselves. She already made arrangements with a Ceulan buyer, so the buyer probably already knows I’m coming in on a ship called _Ketaya_, and I can’t change our ID beacon without looking like a smuggler. If we dock there, they _will_ get aboard and they _will_ kill me. So I want to fly by, drop off the Ferengi, and get away before the Ceuli aboard realize I’m not going to dock.”

“Well, I had made arrangements for us to be met by Starfleet Security on Kyreer, and since Anderson is expecting us there we can arrange to have a doctor with access to your medical records waiting for us. But aren’t we much too far from Kyreer? Even if we remained on the same heading when we were hijacked, we’ve been captive for a week. We should have been to Kyreer in three days. And most likely, we didn’t stay on the same heading.”

“Yes, but with a few bursts of transwarp I can get us back there in two, three days at most from here. If we have emergency rations, I say we do that.”

“I thought transwarp would blow the crystals.”

“No, we can safely run for ten minutes at a time, the way I have it configured now. We do ten on, half an hour off, and we’ll cut our transit time to a third.”

“I need headphones to finish the mindwipe on Yalit. We can’t bring _her_ to Kyreer.”

“I have headphones in my room.”

“Then why did you let me spend twenty minutes looking for them?”

“Because you only just told me now it was _headphones_ you wanted!”

She did not sigh. “Can you get them for me?”

“I’m in a hoverchair, T’Laren.”

“Yes, so you cannot be left alone with Yalit. If she were to get loose, she could actually overpower you in your weakened state.”

Q did sigh. “_Fine._”

When Q was gone, T’Laren walked over to Yalit. “Are you still conscious?”

“I’m going to throw up,” the woman mumbled.

“You might. This won’t affect the procedure.”

“You should kill me. I’m going to make you both pay for this.”

“I do not kill helpless people for making insubstantial threats.”

Q came back with the headphones. T’Laren hooked one end to the computer and the other end over Yalit’s large ears, which they barely fit around, and then gave Q a microphone. “This is directional. You speak into it and it will transmit what you say to Yalit’s ears, over the tone. Your headphones aren’t large enough to block out room noise from Ferengi ears, so I’ll bandage her head to seal the headphones in and block her ears, and leave the room to reduce the noise. Simply say something into the microphone, and Yalit will forget whatever you say. You must go into detail on concepts, though; saying ‘transwarp’ might cause her to forget the _word_ transwarp, but the concepts will remain until you describe those.”

She showed him how to activate and deactivate the tone and images that would put Yalit in the erasure state, and finished bandaging up Yalit's head.

"While I'm doing this, why don't you go pull up an engineering manual on a padd and fix the transporter? What I had you do to it before effectively breaks it for any purpose that’s _not_ a weapon.”

“Very well. That’s a good idea.”

“And I’ll probably have to do this to the three guys from engineering, too. I don’t _think_ they were smart enough to understand much of what I was teaching them, but I don’t want to have to explain to the Continuum why me underestimating a Ferengi’s brain led to war in the Alpha Quadrant.”

“Yes, but after Yalit is done. I don’t want them in contact with her in any way until we drop them off. They still outnumber us.” T’Laren broke off the ending of the last bandage and fastened the edge. “I’m going to engineering. Try not to enjoy this too much.”

“That’s a hopeless task,” Q said, sounding amused.

* * *

When she was gone, Q turned off the images and the tone, waited a moment until Yalit’s slumped posture changed to a tenser, more upright one, and picked up the mike. “Testing, testing. Yalit? Can you hear me in there? Hellooo, little troll…”

“Just… get on with it,” Yalit mumbled.

“Oh, I will. But I want you to know exactly what I’m going to do.”

“I heard… her explaining. Know… how… it works.”

“But there’s something you don’t know,” he purred into the microphone. “T’Laren thinks I’m just going to take away transwarp. But after everything you’ve done to me, and her… I don’t think that’s _nearly_ enough.”

“What…” She sounded frightened. Good. Her fear delighted him.

“I’m going to take away _math_,” he whispered into the mike.

“What… no!” Yalit started thrashing in her bonds. “No! You can’t!”

“I can. When I’m done, you not only won’t be a physicist anymore… you’ll be _innumerate._ What will that do to your business acumen, I wonder?”

“Please!”

“Tell me, Yalit. When I said ‘please’, when you held a neurowhip over me, how much attention did _you_ pay to it?”

And as she struggled, he flipped on the tone and images. Within seconds, she quieted, her jaw going slack and her head falling back against the chair.

Q began with transwarp. He described to Yalit, in detail, the principles he’d been forced to explain to her before. Then he described how regular warp drive worked. Then he recited the multiplication tables with factors 0 through 20, and the squares of 0 through 20, and the associative property, and the commutative property, and all of the division operations that were inverse to the times tables he’d already recited, and some axioms of geometry, and then all the addition tables for numbers 0 through 10 and the corresponding subtraction operations.

He turned off the images, but not the tone, leaving her to return to consciousness but effectively deaf to the outside world. “I’m done here, T’Laren,” he said over the coms. “Take her back and get me the engineers.”

T’Laren retrieved Yalit, who was dazed and stumbling, and came back with the three engineers, marching them at phaser point. She hooked all three of them up together by scanning Q’s headphones into the replicator and then replicating two copies, so all three could be connected to the same program and Q wouldn’t have to repeat himself. Two of the engineers were the two men who had held Q down in Yalit’s office so she could beat him. Taking math from them, too, would take too long. But after he was done wiping out transwarp, Q unplugged the third engineer’s headphones – this one hadn’t actually done anything in particular to harm him, so he wasn’t going to do more harm than he needed to – and whispered to the other two, “Your mother is Yalit. You love your mother. You respect your mother. You do everything she tells you to,” before finally releasing them. He had no idea if that was going to work, but if it did… let Yalit deal with the poisonous misogyny of the Ferengi directed at her from men she thought she had under her control, men she actually cared about. That would be a good start on what she deserved for her willingness to let her sons rape a woman who’d done her no harm.

* * *

When they reached Miona Station, T’Laren forced the Ferengi at phaserpoint to get on the transporter platform. Yalit and four of them went willingly enough, but the last one balked when he saw Q at the controls. “I’m not getting on any transporter he’s operating!”

“Oh, for the sake of all that’s holy.” Q rolled his eyes. “If I wanted to transport you into space, or turn you into antimatter, or transport your head off, I’d have _done_ it already.”

“No! I’d rather be shot!”

“As you wish,” T’Laren said, and stunned him. As the four men and Yalit reacted with expressions of horror, she said, “He’s stunned. Pick him up and put him on the platform with the rest of you, or I will change my phaser setting to ‘disintegrate’ and shoot him again.”

With bad grace, two of the Ferengi picked up their brother and carried him to the platform. “I’m going to remember this,” Yalit said, her face dark with helpless rage.

“You do that,” Q said.

“I _will_ make you pay for this.”

“Attempting to make Q pay for slights against you is why your family now numbers five, not thirty-five,” T’Laren said coldly. “You do not have enough descendants left to afford to come after him again.”

“Good-_bye_, Yalit,” Q snapped, and activated the transporter.

As soon as they were gone he looked at T’Laren. “Get to the secondary control center in engineering and warp us the hell out of here before Yalit finds her Ceulan buyer and tells them to go after us. I’ll catch up with you in a few minutes and start nursing this sucker through transwarp bursts.”

T’Laren nodded. Q’s hoverchair didn’t move as fast as she could run, and the damage to the bridge had thrown off automatic control, so they couldn’t go to warp from inside the transporter room. She bolted for engineering.

When Q finally caught up, he looked awful, gray and tired. “Are you sure you’re up for this, Q?” T’Laren asked. “You look unwell.”

“My painkillers are wearing off. If you can get me some more… and one of those emergency ration things. I’m starving.”

“We have had a _very_ stressful day, and a very long one, with little food, and you’re injured. I think you should sleep tonight, and we can use transwarp in the morning.”

“I think the sooner we get to Kyreer the sooner I can have medical attention from a doctor who’s not out to kill me, and the faster we get away from anywhere near the Ceulan homeworld, the more secure I’ll feel. Get me painkillers and stimulants. And food.”

“That’s really not good for you. The painkillers and stimulants, at least; I’m sure the ration bars are an excellent idea.”

“I know, but do you know what would be really, really bad for me? Having a shapechanger transport over here, eviscerate me and rip my heart out of my chest. That would be _extremely_ bad for me.” He sighed. “I’ll do this maybe four, five hours, and then get some sleep the next time the meds wear off, all right?”

“All right.” She wanted to reach out to him, to hold him, to show her appreciation for everything he’d done in the past week and her understanding of how hard it had been for him, especially everything that had happened today. But after what she’d done to him, she felt like she didn’t dare touch him unless he explicitly invited her to, ever again.

Q smiled tiredly. “Cheer up, T’Laren. We’re alive, we’re free, we have the run of our ship again, no one’s beating us up or poisoning us, and even emergency rations can’t possibly be as bad as some of the stuff the Ferengi fed us. You and I single-handedly beat 35 Ferengi and escaped captivity. That’s impressive, don’t you think? Really, things could be _much_ worse.”

“Yes, of course. I’m just concerned for you.”

“Well, go get me my meds and then there’ll be much less need for concern.” Q punched in a sequence on the engineering console. “Transwarp burst in three, two, one. Blast off.”

The sound of the engine changed, but without viewscreens there were no other visible signs that they were moving faster than regular warp would allow. “Don’t blow up the ship while I’m gone getting your medication.”

He actually grinned. “We’re footloose and fancy-free, heading for a planet where I can annoy people and they won’t try to kill me or torture me for it. Why would I want to blow up the ship?”

“Of course, annoying people with impunity is a critical issue for you.”

“Of course.”

She headed for sickbay. He was holding together remarkably well, considering all they’d been through. But she didn’t know if the connection between them would be as resilient as he himself was. They’d have to talk about what had happened. Later. After his leg was better, at least.

Maybe much later.


End file.
